RZ 401 

.M26 

1886 
Copy 2 







*b v 













V«* 












r- **o« f 






V-TT^cf 



C* * 







*.°** 



9*. 









>* ♦•^1% 



% 








l ;*S 



Mental Healing. 



■ 



I 









in 

ESSENTIALS 



Mental Healing 



THE THEORY AND PRACTICE 



By L. M. MARSTON, M. D. 
n 



SECOND EDITION REVISED. 



BOSTON 
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 



lE 3Y 
olishing Co. 

Bldg. CmCAtO. 



Cm 









Copyrighted 1886. 

BY 
I* 1VL MARSTON. 



3y Transfer 

D. C. Public Library 

JUL 13 1932 



PREFACE 



He who publishes a book to inform the 
reader, rather than to flatter a personal 
conceit, justifies the act as a response to 
an existing demand. It is to such a feel- 
ing that this little manual owes its origin. 
The interest in the phenomena of mental 
healing is rapidly increasing in all parts 
of the country, and thousands of intelli- 
gent, thoughtful people, with no special 
leaning toward what they account a 
doubtful science, are asking for a com- 
prehensive, explicit statement, in plain 
language, of the theory and practice of 
this way of treating disease ; teachers and 
students also are in need of a suitable 
and convenient text-book. It is to such 
seekers after light and help that this work 
is addressed. 



MENTAL HEALING. 



But after much and varied experience 
in the teaching and practice of mental 
healing, the author is convinced that 
much has been claimed as part and parcel 
of the subject which does not strictly belong 
to it, while the essentials need to be pre- 
sented more clearly and logically. 

This volume, as far as the author under- 
stands them, embodies the truths common 
to all forms of mind healing, and excludes 
whatever is dogmatical or tends to dis- 
criminate in favor of any particular school 
or way of practice. It recognizes and 
explains the principles of " Christian 
Science," " prayer-and-f aith cure," and 
other methods of metaphysical and psychi- 
cal treatment of disease, which have a 
common basis in truth. 

All agree to say that the healing power 
is of God, that the real man is the spiritual 
and not the physical being, and that right 
thinking produces right action. These 
subjects are considered in the following 
pages, in their proper order. What is 
taught about Supreme Intelligence as the 
source of life, knowledge and power, is the 
leading topic, because all true ideas take 



TO BE READ IN COURSE. J 

their departure from God as the center. 
Man is the next subject treated, because 
it is necessary to know what he is and 
what relations he sustains to God, in 
order to understand him. Since the 
human body, which is the object of heal- 
ing, is material, and disease is a phenom- 
enon of organized matter, the true theory 
of matter is also explained and applied. 

The chapter on the mental treatment of 
disease is based on what has been pre- 
viously explained in the book, and cannot 
be fully understood until the contents of 
the previous pages are mastered. The 
reader is, therefore, recommended to begin 
with this preface, and read each division 
of the book in order, omitting nothing, 
until the last; he will then have given the 
subject a candid hearing, in the particular 
way in which mental healers prefer to 
have it presented, and may then be fairly 
entitled to accept or reject the claims 
advocated herein. 

In preparing the work the aim has been 
to so arrange the subject matter, that the 
book would be adapted to the wants of 
the general reader, and at the same time 



5 MENTAL HEALING. 

suitable as a text-book for the use of 
teachers and students in the class-room. 

While writing out the theories and 
statements that long experience and care- 
ful study show to be the essential ground- 
work of the art of healing without medi- 
cine, the author has been stimulated by 
the hope (which he believes well founded), 
that the product of his labor will be the 
means of great good to his fellow-men, by 
leading them to withdraw attention from 
the illusions of material sense, and grasp 
with firmer faith and clearer vision eternal 
realities and spiritual truth. 

The author is a firm believer in immor- 
tality, — a conscious existence after the 
change called death. The fact that we 
have a conscious identity now, is proof 
that we shall always remain the conscious 
individual expression of the one Spirit, 
God. 

L. M. M. 

130 Chandler St., Boston. 
December, 1886. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

Introduction n 

I. God 19 

II. Man 33 

III. Matter 48 

IV. Disease 63 

V. Sin and Death j6 

VI. Healing 86 

VII. Treatment 98 

VIII. Universal Truth 116 

9 



INTRODUCTION 



Man's inmost consciousness is the 
touchstone of recondite as well as obvious 
truth. Get but that sure test, and it may- 
be trusted to the last ; for " the soul's em- 
phasis is always right." The contents of 
this little book, although not opposed to 
sound reason, appeals mainly to this cer- 
tain test, and relies on intuitive perception, 
rather than logic, in support of the posi- 
tions assumed. 

But it frequently happens that the 
easiest approach to the star-chamber of 
conviction lies along the line of expe- 
rience and memory. Especially is this 
the case with the subject herein consid- 
ered, and any reader, who stops to pon- 
der the evidence, will find facts enough 
about which he knows, to disarm preju- 



12 MENTAL HEALING. 

dice and bespeak for these pages a candid 
perusal. 

All who have seen much of the work-, 
ings of disease are ready to acknowledge 
the truth of Dr. O. W. Holmes's assertion 
that " the great proportion of cases of 
sickness tend to get well, sooner or later, 
with good nursing and little or no medi- 
cine." Mother Nature is forever mend- 
ing. There is a power enlisted on the 
side of recovery and health that, under 
various names, as " vitality," " anima," 
"nervous influence," "sensorial energy," 
"vital principle," "occult cause," "stim- 
uli," " vis medicatrix nature?" makes for a 
cure, whether the circumstances be favor- 
able or adverse. 

The helpful influence of this persistent 
life force comes to the invalid, sometimes 
as a mere impression that his time to die 
is not at hand, or that his life-work is un- 
finished and he cannot be spared, or that 
he chooses to get well and will not yield 
the struggle; but oftener it is simply a 
tenacity of life, a vitality that conquers 
every morbid tendency, and finally lifts the 
patient to his feet. 



WARDING OFF DISEASE. 1 3 

Another fact of common observation is 
that the mind exerts a powerful influence 
on the state of health. Cheerfulness, 
hopefulness, and fortitude are the allies of 
recovery ; dejection, sorrow, and fright are 
in league with death. As much skepti- 
cism about the presence of disease as is 
consistent with prudence tends to ward it 
off. 

" The best receipt for health, say what 
they will, 
Is never to suppose we shall be ill." 

A positive, dogged refusal to believe 
himself sick has saved many a man from a 
dangerous illness. The advantage of 
withdrawing attention from symptoms that 
are alarming, and fixing the thought on 
something else is well understood. In 
this way the parent soothes the crying 
infant, and by the same means Mother 
Nature makes her larger child forget his 
languor and pain, while she pours upon 
his wounds the balm of her own prophy- 
lactic. 

All know how fruitful of disorder are 
anxiety, worry, protracted care, misdirected 
sympathy, superstitious dread, fidgets, per- 



14 MENTAL HEALING. 

verted imagination, unrestrained passion, 
and bad temper. From these cruel ene- 
mies of health let us hope to be delivered. 
But on the other hand, how it helps one to 
be well to cherish tranquillity of mind, 
content, calm faith, an imperturbable spirit, 
freedom from undue care, reasonableness, 
and personal discipline. 

" The body constantly acts on the mind: 
this is now universally recognized. It is 
not as often noticed how the mind acts 
upon the body. A mind strengthened by 
truth and a determined purpose will sup- 
port a feeble body, and enable it to do 
wonders. Mental excitement often cures 
bodily disease. There are authentic cases 
of persons given over by their physicians, 
who resisted death and saved their lives 
by a strong determination not to die. 
Any influence which rouses the mind to 
action will often cure the body. One day 
we shall have a mind-cure hospital, where 
bodily disease will be relieved by applica- 
tions to the mind. Meantime, how much 
can be done for invalids by visits from 
cheerful, bright, entertaining visitors, — 
by religious influences which inspire faith 



A MIND-CURE HOSPITAL. 1 5 

and hope, and not doubt and fear. What- 
ever turns the mind out of itself, causes it to 
look up, interests it in helpful truths, helps 
the body too. " — James Freeman Clarke. 

The suggestion of a mind-cure hospital, 
made seven years ago by the eminent 
divine and author just quoted, calls atten* 
tion to the evidences of a belief in the 
possibility of healing without the use of 
medicine. Many facts go to show that 
such a belief has always existed in the 
human mind, and that such cures have not 
been uncommon in any age of the world. 
We read in " Bread Pills " : " Cabalism, 
exorcism, fetichism, imposition of hands, 
anointing with oil, touching sacred relics, 
visiting shrines, spells, amulets, periapts, 
prayer-and-faith cures, mesmerism, meta- 
physical healing, are each and all confes- 
sions of a wide-spread belief that, some- 
how, Nature is not wholly dependent on 
the virtues of drugs and regimen, but will, 
on certain conditions, restore health by 
short cuts of her own. " 

It does not require great capacity for 
marvels to enable one to see that history 



l6 MENTAL HEALING. 

abounds in intimations that what was 
known among the earlier Apostles as 
" the gift of healing " is the common pro- 
perty of the human race. During the 
centuries antedating the discovery of what 
is termed rational medicine, on what else 
did people rely for help in time of sick- 
ness ? There can be no reasonable doubt 
that, among all nations in ancient times, 
the mental treatment of disease was the 
usual method, and so common that such 
cures excited no more surprise or remark 
than the cures wrought by medicine do 
now. 

This conviction is forced upon the 
thought when it is remembered that the 
ancient inhabitants of India, Persia, Judea, 
Greece, Italy, and Egypt, believed in and 
practiced mind-cure. The Celtic tribes of 
western Europe and the British isles held 
similar doctrines ; and even the barbarous 
aborigines of this and other countries put 
faith in magic and incantations. Some 
may prefer to regard this kind of evidence 
proof of the superstitious dread of demoni- 
acal spirits that influenced the credulous 
people of early times ; but it is produced 



HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. \J 

for the sake of impression rather than 
argument; and what will these same peo- 
ple infer concerning the generally ac- 
cepted cures alleged to have been wrought 
by Jesus and his followers ? 

The Christian fathers and writers bore 
unequivocal testimony to the reality of 
mental healing as practiced by themselves 
and others, and the early records of many 
of the Protestant religious sects abound in 
instances of the same sort. Many genu- 
ine, well attested cases of restoration to 
health by psychical means have also been 
reported in more recent years, and are of 
frequent occurrence at the present time. 
Here, too, is a mass of cumulative evi- 
dence that it is useless to deny; for Rev. 
J. M. Buckley, D. D., a disbeliever, and 
obstinate opposer of all such phenomena, 
says in his recent article in the Century 
Magazine: "After all deductions have 
been made, the fact that most extraordi- 
nary recoveries have been produced, some 
of them instantaneously, from disease in 
some cases generally considered to be in- 
curable by ordinary treatment, in others 
known to be curable in the ordinary pro- 



1 8 MENTAL HEALING. 

cess of medicine and surgery only by slow 
degrees, must be admitted. " 

The evidence thus far presented is de- 
rived, for obvious reasons, from sources 
outside the ranks of " metaphysical heal- 
ing," " Christian science," and other pro- 
fessional mental curing, as taught and 
practiced by the different schools of heal- 
ers that have recently sprung up in this 
country, and are doing what seems to be 
very wonderful work. It is given in the 
sincere hope that it will lead those who 
have never informed themselves on the 
subject to consider what follows in a spirit 
of fairness, and to look upon mental heal- 
ing, not as a new thing announcing itself 
in these modern times by signs and won- 
ders, but as a broader development and 
fuller application of a power that has 
always been used to some extent for the 
benefit of mankind. It comes not as a 
fresh marvel appealing to public credulity, 
but as a blessing, amenable to and in har- 
mony with the universal law of being, and 
resting on a scientific basis of truth that 
all men are capable of understanding and 
applying for themselves. 



GOD. 

Our age is grossly material. It believes 
in the reality of lands and merchandise, 
and trusts its five senses to the last. If it 
admit the existence of spirits, and that 
men may sometime be disembodied ghosts, 
it banishes such supernatural beings to an 
invisible abode, and goes resolutely about 
its business, stoically bearing the ills of 
life as best it may. 

We are about to enter upon the study 
of a science that treats life from another 
point of view. It disputes the evidence 
of the senses and refuses to accept their 
reports as final. Instead of following the 
beaten path by which theology has striven 
for centuries to climb from the material to 
the spiritual, reasoning from nature up to 
nature's God, we now reverse the process, 
and, planting ourselves at the center of 
being, endeavor to start at the cause and 
thus be able to account for the effect. 



20 MENTAL HEALING. 

At the very threshold of his course the 
student finds himself face to face with 
the profoundest problems that have ever 
engaged the human mind. Mental heal- 
ing, which is the subject treated in these 
lessons, has a basis in scientific Chris- 
tianity, and not only cures bodily disease, 
but introduces a moral reform that har- 
monizes all being. The right understand- 
ing of man's relations to the Infinite is the 
secret of health and the sovereign panacea 
for every human ill. Inasmuch, then, as a 
sound mind and a sound body depend on 
an adequate knowledge of scientific Chris- 
tianity, and the center of the Christian 
system is divine, the study of this subject 
properly begins with the inquiry, What is 
God? 

The answer to this all-important ques- 
tion is not to be sought in the dogmas 
of any church on the one hand, or in 
the mysteries of occult theosophy on the 
other, which at best are only mutable 
human theories and opinions. It is 
derived rather from the intuitive percep- 
tion of men of every nation in all ages of 
the world, that God is Spirit, Soul, or 



DOCTRINE OF GOD. 21 

Substance, — and, in the Christian con- 
ception of Him, the creative Principle and 
almighty Source of life. God is the name 
of that higher intelligence that every 
religion exalts as Deity, and that the 
Christian faith endows with the superlative 
attributes of infinite perfection. 

It is fundamental to a true understand- 
ing of God that He be believed in as the 
one only Deity, omniscient, omnipotent 
and omnipresent. Such a comprehensive 
definition of God divests mental science of 
many difficulties at the outset; for, if He 
be all-wise, as Christianity teaches, knowl- 
edge has a divine origin and is spiritual. 
If He be all-powerful, whatever else seems 
to be a power is limited, and therefore 
finite. If He be everywhere present, 
nothing in the universe can exclude Him. 

Scientific Christianity, following the 
example of its great founder and teacher, 
carries this conception of Deity somewhat 
farther. When the metaphysician declares 
God to be the All-wise, he does not admit 
that other beings in the universe possess 
less or a limited wisdom. He insists that 
God is wisdom,^ and there is no other wis- 



22 MENTAL HEALING. 

dom in the world. To him the statement 
that God is all-powerful means more than 
an acknowledgment that the Supreme 
Being possesses boundless might ; for it 
denies power to every other being or 
organism, and affirms God to be the power 
that moves whatever acts, and produces 
force wherever it is felt. As no wheel or 
belt in the machinery of a great factory is 
able to start itself, but each and all are 
kept in motion by power communicated 
from the engine that drives the mill, so 
every movement in nature and every voli- 
tion of man or animal is God acting 
through the thing that moves. Again, if 
God be everywhere present, everything 
else must be excluded, because when He 
fills all there is not room for anything else ; 
consequently all is God. And these views, 
it may be remarked, find abundant con- 
firmation in the statements of the New 
Testament. " There is one God and 
Father of all, who is above all, and through 
all, and in you all." — Ephesians, iv. 6. 
" There is but one God, the Father, of 
whom are all things, and we in Him." — 
/. Corinthians, viii. 6. 



GOD IS SPIRIT. 23 

The doctrine of Deity appears clearer 
when referred to the definition of God 
already adopted : God is Spirit. Spirit 
knows all that is known. Spirit acts 
through everything that moves. Spirit 
fills the universe with its presence. And 
from such considerations it is an easy step 
to the next admission, that Spirit is the 
only life. All life implies action and is 
an exhibition of power. Motion, doing, 
progress, are inseparable from the very 
idea of life. To say, then, that Spirit, or 
God, is the only power is to declare that 
Spirit lives while nothing else is alive ; 
and the truth that every form of life in 
God's vast universe is Spirit is the grand 
central doctrine of scientific Christianity, 
and the key to all mental healing. 

Observing the evidences of life that 
appeal to our senses on every hand, we 
say in the true understanding of the 
reality: Vegetation has no life in itself, 
causing it to grow; the stars have no 
power to traverse their vast orbits ; 
animals do not possess automatic motion. 
Material forms are inert and dead. Spirit 
is the life that puts forth buds and makes 



24 MENTAL HEALING. 

the grass to spring ; Spirit whirls celestial 
orbs in their eternal courses ; Spirit uses and 
operates the muscles of every living crea- 
ture, making the physical body its servant. 
God is Substance. By this term is not 
meant that Deity assumes a tangible, ma- 
terial body, either in a literal or panthe- 
istic sense. The word is employed in its 
original sense, as used by philosophers 
and theologians, to signify that which 
underlies all outward manifestations, and 
causes all material and spiritual phe- 
nomena. Substance, from its Latin 
derivation, denotes that which stands 
under or behind, and sustains whatever 
rests upon it. And it is worth our 
while to notice that this definition of God 
is not new, but has been a favorite one 
with the greatest thinkers of every age. 
It is a modern, unscientific use of the 
word to call one's estate or goods his sub- 
stance. The true substance is that which 
underlies all that may be apprehended by 
the physical senses ; it is that which gives 
life and motion to material objects, is con- 
stantly expressing itself in nature, and is 
the sole reality in the universe. 



GOD IS SUBSTANCE. 2$ 

Very properly, then, these words have 
been chosen to stand for the one infinite 
Power and Life of the world, — God, 
Spirit, Substance, — the intelligent gov- 
erning principle of all being. The oldest 
Indian Scriptures affirmed that " the world 
is but a manifestation of Vishnu (the Su- 
preme,) who is identical with all things." 
Plato called God " the great Intelligence, 
Source of all intelligence, the Sun whose 
light illuminates creation." Jesus meant 
the same great power when he said, " I 
am the way, the truth and the life." Paul 
declared on Mars Hill, that " in him (God) 
we live and move and have our being." 
Spinoza wrote, " Whatever is is in God, 
for He is the sole Substance." Fichte 
considered God " the moral order of the 
universe." Schelling exclaimed, " He is 
the All in All ! " Tennyson thought of 
God as " the one . . . divine event, 
to which the whole creation moves." Em- 
erson embodied the truth in its complete- 
ness in the sentence : " We learn that the 
Highest is present to the soul of man, that 
dread universal Essence, which is not 
wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all 



26 MENTAL HEALING. 

in one, and each entirely, is that for which 
all things exist, and that by which they 
are ; that Spirit creates ; that behind na- 
ture, throughout nature, Spirit is present ; 
one, and not compound, it does not act 
upon us from without, that is, in space and 
time, but spiritually, through ourselves : 
therefore that Spirit, that is, the Supreme 
Being, does not build up nature around 
us, but puts it forth through us, as the 
life of the tree puts forth new branches 
and leaves through the pores of the old." 

If we accept the doctrine that God is 
Spirit or Substance, and the only life and 
power in the whole universe, we are pre- 
pared for the further deduction that Spirit 
is one. The ancient mythologies peopled 
the invisible world with gods and ghosts ; 
all religions recognize spirits as indi- 
viduals; the Christian church teaches that 
every man has an immortal soul, a distinct 
entity, which will one day quit its bodily 
tenement and become a naked spirit. All 
such notions the mental healer confronts 
with a flat denial, as radical error, and 
affirms the essential oneness of Spirit. 



ALL LIFE IS SPIRIT. 2*J 

This view of the case is inevitable from 
what has been already stated ; for, if all 
life be spirit, and spirit be only another 
name for God, a belief in the existence of 
spirits would plunge us into an abyss of 
hopeless polytheism. It should be observed 
also that the great principle of life is 
never called the spirit, as though it were a 
personality, but Spirit, which is not a 
personality at all, but an all- pervading 
intelligence, in which we live and move 
and have our being. God is not a king, 
ruling over a community of spirits, as 
Milton pictures him. The true concep- 
tion was suggested by Jesus in the simile 
of the vine and its branches. As the all- 
embracing atmosphere pervades and occu- 
pies all space so that no vacuum will 
entirely exclude it, but manifests its 
presence in different ways, as rushing 
wind, as the life-sustaining breath of 
animals and plants, as the vehicle of 
sound, as the transparent sea in which 
birds and clouds may float securely; so 
Spirit contains all, but cannot be con- 
tained, and makes its presence felt wher- 
ever life exists or power acts. If it be 



28 MENTAL HEALING. 

hard to persuade ourselves that the life 
and intelligence manifest in a particular 
individual is not a separate entity but an 
influx of omnipresent spirit, it is also 
difficult to persuade the judgment that 
every human being we see is not a sepa- 
rate personality, but an individual expres- 
sion of the one Spirit, God. 

Spirit, then, is one, but expresses itself 
in innumerable ways that take form and 
appeal to the senses of man for recog- 
nition. We do not have spirits or 
souls ; but Spirit has us, and uses our 
mental faculties as hands and feet. Spirit 
is one ; that is God. Spirit expresses 
itself through ideas or intuitions ; that 
is what we call the spiritual man. This 
manifestation includes man, as the tree 
includes the branches. It is very helpful 
to dwell much in the thought that God is 
our intelligence and the source of the 
knowledge about which we think and 
reason. Spirit suggests the ideas that 
flash into our minds like sudden lights. 
Whenever in hours of deep meditation 
the truth, which had long been hidden 
and obscure, breaks in upon the under- 



SPIRIT NOT PERSONAL. 29 

Standing as an instant revelation, that is 
Spirit shining in and through us with its 
awakening presence. Then are we aware 
that the personality we are wont to 
consider as ourselves is nothing, but that 
all our life, knowledge, ideas, and power 
belong to the eternal Substance, that con- 
tains and sustains us, and is God. For 
it is not by learned argument, but after 
much reflection that the truth at length 
dawns upon our consciousness. " All 
goes to show," wrote Emerson, pursuing 
the same thought, " that the soul in man 
is not an organ, but animates and exercises 
all the organs ; is not a function, like the 
power of memory, of calculation, of com- 
parison, but uses these as hands and feet ; 
is not a faculty, but a light; is not the 
intellect or the will, but the master of the 
intellect and the will ; is the background 
of our being, in which they lie, — an im- 
mensity not possessed and that cannot be 
possessed. From within or from behind, 
a light shines through us upon things, 
and makes us aware that we are nothing, 
but the light is all. . . , What we 
commonly call man, the eating, drinking, 



30 MENTAL HEALING. 

counting man, does not, as we know him, 
represent himself, but misrepresents him- 
self. Him we do not respect, but the soul 
(Spirit), whose organ he is, would he 
let it appear through his action, would 
make our knees bend. When it breathes 
through his intellect, it is genius ; when it 
breathes through his will, it is virtue ; 
when it flows through his affection, it is 
love." Here, then, we catch a glimpse of 
the grand and inspiring thought that, in 
our search after truth, it is not necessary 
to reason it out by painful, laborious 
study, as though it lay hidden in the human 
intellect, and must be dug out and brought 
to the surface. It is not thinking that 
gives us a new truth, though thought has 
its legitimate use ; but Spirit or Soul, 
which is truth itself, breathes through our 
minds and makes us wise. It is God who 
knows ; it is man who thinks. 

Another thought arising in this connec- 
tion is, that Spirit abolishes time and 
space. We have been so long under the 
tyranny of the senses, that we habitually 
classify events by locality and dates. We 
say it was in Boston, London, or Japan 



•TIME ABOLISHED. 3 I 

that such and such things happened yes- 
terday, a year ago, or in the early ages of 
the world ; consequently it startles us to 
learn that Spirit knows nothing of such 
boundaries, but 

" Can crowd eternity into an hour, 
Or stretch an hour into eternity." 

It is only in the senses that the distinc- 
tions of past, present and future are 
possible ; or that an object occupies a 
particular place or position in space. 
These measurements seem to be necessary 
and real; but philosophy has long ago 
decided them to be illusions of the brain, 
not essential to a true understanding. In 
fact, we ourselves lose sight of them when 
the spell of dream and reverie is upon us, 
and the fetters of sense are broken. 

In this as in all else, the first great 
lesson for the student of mental healing- 
to learn is to break loose from the 
bondage of the senses, and see things as 
they actually are. He must place himself 
at the center, and not try to reason from 
the outside of the circle of being. He 
must start with God, the cause, and not 



32 MENTAL HEALING. 

with man, the effect. This is what is 
meant in the opening of this chapter as 
understanding aright the relation of man 
to Deity. The errors and deceptions 
which have occasioned untold evil in the 
world, leading man to deny God and 
assert himself as a power and an indepen- 
dent being, vanish in the light of truth ; 
and we, if we would know the truth and 
forsake the false, must turn our faces 
steadfastly to the sun, until our whole 
being is pervaded with the clear daylight, 
and the truth of being, which is the light 
of men, shall make us free indeed. 



II. 



MAN, 

Having considered God the principle 
and life of the world, the subject that 
naturally follows is Man, who, according 
to the Bible, was created in the image and 
likeness of God, and became a living 
soul. 

Four hundred years before the advent 
of Christ, Empedocles, the celebrated 
Greek philosopher, in his ecstacy at the 
contemplation of " Nature and the Princi- 
ples of Things," exclaimed " I am God ! " 
Jesus lent an implied sanction to the 
claim of the Hebrew law that men are 
gods; and a modern sage has written: 
" The currents of universal being circu- 
late through me ; I am part and particle 
of God. " It was no spirit of boastful 
arrogance that prompted such startling 
utterances from human lips. They con- 
tain a deep truth, and point significantly 
to some elemental secret or fact of being 

33 



34 MENTAL HEALING. 

which the material thought of the present 
age seems to have lost sight of. 

The church maintains that man is soul 
and body, a personal inmate of a physical 
house ; and out of this doctrine has grown 
the widely accepted belief that he has an 
independent material life in this world, 
and an immortal personal life hereafter. 
Material philosophy affirms the existence 
of the human body and the reality of its 
phenomena, for these can be verified ; but 
not all of this school of thinkers believe in 
the soul, since there is no scientific means 
of proving its existence. The idealists, on 
the other hand, have always held that 
man is spirit, and that the spiritual man 
is the only man of whom we have any 
trustworthy knowledge. 

Intelligent students of the science of 
mental healing side with the idealists in 
asserting that the real man is spirit. In 
spite of the popular evolution theory, 
which considers him the last link in a 
chain of endless development having its 
origin in the lowest form of animal life, 
they resolutely set their faces in the oppo- 
site direction. If God be conceived of as 



THE IDEAL THEORY. 35 

the eternal energy and only life of the 
universe, what other theory of man is 
possible ? If he have being at all, he 
must be a manifestation of spirit, and to 
be understood, must be seen from the 
Godward and not from the material side. 
And it is in its definition of man, even 
more than its theory of Deity, that scien- 
tific Christianity conflicts with, and often 
directly antagonizes, the commonly re- 
ceived beliefs of mankind. 

It should be observed, too, that the 
ideal view, though fundamental to mind- 
cure, and firmly held by all successful 
healers, is not supported by the same sen- 
suous logic that makes the materialist so 
sure of his ground. A logic it has, indeed, 
but its foundations do not rest on arith- 
metic and demonstration. The material- 
ist tells you that he takes nothing for 
granted; that planting his feet on the 
solid ground of common sense, he accepts 
what can be verified and no more, believes 
what the senses tell him is true and ex- 
perience proves. The materialist claims 
to found his definitions on facts, so that, 
secure in the certainty of sensation, he 



36 MENTAL HEALING. 

knows where he stands, and consequently 
occupies a position that is impregnable. 

In taking issue with the materialist, 
disciples of the opposite school of thought 
do not dispute his logic, or deny that his 
man of the senses is just what such a 
view makes him. As a sample of clear 
reasoning the materialistic hypothesis is 
irrefragable, and the conclusions irresisti- 
ble ; and this is one secret of its strong 
hold on the popular mind, for it appeals 
to what can be seen and handled, and has 
experience at its back at every step. The 
fallacy of the premises appears only when 
we inquire into the nature of the alleged 
facts on which the logic is based. " You 
reason bravely," says the idealist, "and 
scorn to take anything for granted ; but, 
tell me, pray, how you know that the 
reports of the senses on which you rely 
are true ? " This is the crucial test that 
exposes the flaw in a system of philosophy 
that has changed God's fair domain into a 
waste and made human life a dream of 
woe. " In the order of thought, the ma- 
terialist takes his departure from the 
external world, and esteems a man as one 



THE SPIRITUAL MAN. $? 

product of that. The idealist takes his 
departure from his consciousness, and 
reckons the world an appearance. " 

The consciousness by which scientific 
Christianity tests whatever wears the guise 
of truth has its center in God, that is, in 
Spirit, Substance, Intelligence. It plants 
itself on this definition of the infinite, and 
says that the sole intelligence, and sole 
life, and sole power in the universe, must 
be the cause of whatever is, and there can 
be no other. 

The divine Intelligence, the all-pervasive, 
brooding Spirit, is ever expressing itself. 
Omnipotence is creative, and omniscience 
puts forth ideas, as the tree puts forth 
branches and leaves. Man is an expres- 
sion of infinite knowledge, and may be 
considered an idea of God. But as the 
twigs and leaves of a tree cannot differ 
in character from the tree to which they 
belong, but constitute the tree, so this 
manifestation or expression of divine in- 
telligence cannot be unlike that from 
which it proceeds. Hence we call this 
idea of God a Spiritual Man, because 
his essence being the same, he cannot 



38 MENTAL HEALING. 

be separated from divine intelligence, 
but is spirit. 

In considering what has just been 
written, the reader should receive it as an 
attempt to define in finite human language 
what, from its very nature, transcends 
finite limitations, and cannot therefore be 
expressed in words. Whatever we may- 
say about the being here designated as 
the spiritual man, we know all the while 
that we are only talking about something 
he is like, for spirit in any of its manifes- 
tations eludes our grasp and refuses to be 
described by mortal speech. Yet, by such 
poor means as these it is possible to assist 
our conception, and thus come to a right 
understanding of the truth. 

The spiritual is the real man, the ego, 
the responsible moral agent, the image 
and likeness of divine substance. He is 
not the weak, ignorant, passion-swayed, 
sick and dying creature that our senses 
recognize, and which passes in this world 
for a man. The man we see with bodily 
eyes has none of the godlike powers 
ascribed by definition to the spiritual 
man ; nor does he as we know him more 



INCARNATION. 39 

than feebly reflect that higher intelligence 
whose organ he is. 

As far as it is possible for us to com- 
prehend, we may conceive the spiritual 
man to exercise the same attributes that 
are ascribed to Deity. As each branch 
shares in the common life of the tree, so 
the real man shares in all that in our con- 
ception of Him constitutes the divine 
perfection of God. Intellectually it helps 
us to think of man as a personality ; but 
spiritually he cannot well be separated 
from the one only substance and intelli- 
gence, which is Spirit. 

Another helpful view of the case is that 
the spiritual man stands in his relation to 
God, as human thought stands related to 
mind. When mind acts, we say man 
thinks. When Intelligence expresses 
itself, we intuitively perceive the idea as 
the spiritual man. God is the intelligence 
of the spiritual man. " One mode of the 
divine teaching," says Emerson, " is the 
incarnation of spirit in a form, — in forms 
like my own. " 

Pythagoras taught that the spiritual 
man is an emanation of Intelligence (the 



40 MENTAL HEALING. 

world-soul), and partakes of the divine 
nature. According to the Stoics, he is 
an emanation of Deity, a breath of God 
penetrating the body. " I and my Father 
are one." — Jesus. " When we say, man 
perceives this or that, it is only that God 
has such or such ideas." — Spinoza. " God 
becomes conscious of himself in man : 
and this man, under the highest form of 
his existence, manifests reason, and by this 
reason God knows himself." — Schelling. 
" Man is both the product and the pro- 
ducer of the world, the seer and the sight; 
he is the Absolute Spirit, the concrete 
expression of God." — Hegel. " We are 
conscious of a thinking, feeling and acting 
self, which has no bodily qualities." — 
James Freeman Clarke. " Man is con- 
scious of a universal soul within or behind 
his individual soul, wherein, as in a firma- 
ment, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, 
Freedom, arise and shine." — Emerson. 

Retracing our steps we see that the 
real man is an emanation of divine intelli- 
gence, and as such is endowed with what- 
ever attributes are ascribed to Deity. For 



THE COMMON SOUL. 41 

the same reason the spiritual man cannot 
be regarded as a personality, dividing 
itself into numberless distinct souls, each 
identified with a human body. This spir- 
itual entity, very properly called the soul by 
many writers and philosophers, possesses 
little in common with that soul which the 
creeds of the church and the dogmas of 
materialism assume to be the tenant of 
each and every human breast, shut in and 
fettered by physical senses and organs. 

By definition the soul of man is divine 
intelligence flowing into manifold organ- 
isms or visible manifestations ; conse- 
quently there is one soul common to all 
individual men. Every man " is an inlet 
to the same and all of the same," and is a 
channel through which the influx of 
common or universal life and power is 
constantly flowing. By whatever name it 
is known, its essential quality is that it is 
never the private property of any man, 
but the soul of the whole; the common 
heart ; the one deep, eternal power acces- 
sible to all men ; so that underneath the 
external disguises imposed by the material 
senses, all men are one. " It is one light 



42 . MENTAL HEALING. 

which beams out of a thousand stars. It 
is one soul which animates all men." 

Hard as it may be for those who have 
always thought of man as a personality to 
realize the doctrine that the soul of man 
is the common soul of all, there seems to 
be no other plausible theory that satisfac- 
torily accounts for what takes place in the 
practice of mental healing, and for much 
that belongs to common experience. Due 
reflection should convince any man as it 
did Descartes, that the idea of a perfect 
common intelligence is an infinite, eternal 
necessity. 

A clear conception of what is meant 
by the spiritual man is often needlessly 
involved and made difficult by the misuse 
or inexact use of the words and terms 
employed in writing and talking about it. 
Ignorantly or carelessly people predicate 
soul, mind, and thought at one time of the 
sensual man, at another of the spiritual 
man, and then again ascribe such faculties 
to God himself. Such verbal license is 
admissible in popular language where the 
context informs the reader of the true 
sense : but in didactic and scientific 






THOUGHT DEFINED. 43 

language it leads to confusion. On account 
of the ambiguous looseness with which 
most of the publications on the subject of 
mental healing abound, it is necessary to 
say something here on the right and 
wrong use of the word thought. 

If the student look in the dictionary he 
will find that to think is to consider, 
ponder, meditate, contemplate, commune 
with one's self, cogitate, muse. These 
are the common synonyms for think. If 
we examine them attentively, we find that 
each of these words signifies an effort of 
the mental powers. To consider means 
to sit close to a thing, that is, to study 
closely with fixed attention. To ponder 
is to weigh an argument in mind, as a 
merchant weighs his wares in scales. To 
meditate means to turn a subject over 
and over in the mind, to dwell long upon 
it. To contemplate is to look around us 
and examine all sides of a question. To 
commune with one's self is to hold a silent 
conversation. To cogitate is to pursue 
with thought, to agitate. To muse is to 
entertain in a pleasing way that which 
occupies the mental attention. 



44 MENTAL HEALING. 

It is easy to see that each and all of 
these efforts of mind to get at and com- 
prehend the truth imply toil. We know 
by experience that such exercises tire 
the head and exhaust the nervous force. 
Observe also another characteristic of the 
mental processes denoted by those seven 
synonyms of the word think. In perform- 
ing the function of thinking language 
is brought into use, as truly as when 
one person addresses another in audible 
speech. When you think, you talk to 
yourself, just as when you speak, you talk 
to the listener. Thought is the language 
of contemplation and self-communion, pre- 
cisely as speech is the language of the lips. 

Thinking means the laborious process 
by which the brain arrives at conclusions, 
the language in which it communes with 
itself when revolving an idea to get at all 
sides of it; it is the study that wearies 
the man of the senses. How absurd then 
to predicate thought of spirit ! Does the 
infinite power that creates worlds by a 
simple fiat toil and become exhausted in 
efforts to discover a fact? Does Omni- 
science need to argue and ponder in order 



WHAT THINKS? 45 

to grasp knowledge? The very concep- 
tion forbids that we should tax God with 
such weakness and limitation, or impute a 
like defect to his own image and emana- 
tion, the spiritual man. 

The energy and act of the spiritual 
man consists in knowing. He is recep- 
tive of the constant influx of divine intel- 
ligence. His knowledge is intuition, ap- 
prehension, intellection. Thought is the 
function of the mind, a process, brain labor, 
cerebration. In strict scientific language 
philosophy teaches that Deity knows with- 
out thinking, and the toil of contempla- 
tion is the necessity of a limited mind. 

The inquiry, What is it that thinks? 
introduces us to the man whose bodily 
presence is known through the senses. 
That complex organism is what is gov- 
erned, molded, correlated, and brought 
into unity as a body; is what the meta- 
physician calls the man of the senses. 

From what has been premised it goes 
without saying that this sensuous creature 
is defined by limitations. His brain is the 
laboratory of thought. He fails to exhibit 
many of the virile qualities with which the 



46 MENTAL HEALING. 

spiritual man is endowed. His speech and 
actions betray his frailty, whatever the 
point of view from which he is studied. 

This man of the senses scientific Chris- 
tianity declares to be not the real man, 
but only a reflection. Truly says James 
Russell Lowell, 

" Man, Woman, Nature, each is but a glass 
Where the Soul sees the image of herself." 

That the soul makes the body is one of 
the truisms of philosophy. That the 
body itself is destitute of life, of power, of 
feeling, of intelligence, and is simply an 
organ through which the spiritual man or 
soul acts is another well established pro- 
position. That it seems to be endowed 
with activity and conscious intelligence is 
not strange, for the sensuous, material 
man, seeing only the reflection and not 
the real man that produces it, commits 
the mistake of putting an illusion for the 
reality. To every beholder this reflection 
is precisely what he thinks it is : to the 
materialist it is all that is implied in the 
term man ; to the idealist it is the unreal 
shadow cast by the true man. 



ILLUSIONS OF SENSE. 47 

The great obstacle met with at the very 
threshold of the study of healing science 
is this illusion of the senses, which cheats 
us with mere appearance. Indeed, expe- 
rience shows us that there is no more 
difficult task than to convince one of his 
error when the testimony of the senses is 
at fault. The child in a moving railroad 
car thinks every object he passes is reced- 
ing from him. The ancients believed the 
earth to be flat, and that the sun journeyed 
from east to west athwart the sky. To 
the uninstructed the horizon line is that 
on which the earth and sky appear to 
meet. Thunder was once supposed to be 
the destructive agent in a discharge of 
electricity, and storm-clouds were thought 
to move in the direction of the local wind. 
The light of knowledge has changed all 
these beliefs, and is constantly under- 
mining some cherished delusion of the 
race ; the wise are not as positive of any 
assumed fact as they once were, — why 
should this dream of the sensuous man be 
so hard to dislodge ? 



III. 



MATTER. 

" He who has never doubted the exist- 
ence of matter," said the eminent French 
economist Turgot, " may be assured he 
has no apitude for metaphysical inquiries." 

It is the maxim of common sense and 
the school of experience to believe in mat- 
ter, take things for what they seem, and 
cultivate a worldly thrift. To be thus 
minded promotes animal comfort, and is 
thought indispensable to temporal suc- 
cess. Hard necessity keeps our feet upon 
the earth ; poverty and distress are the 
"beadles" that summon us to attend to 
material concerns. As long as the human 
child needs food, and clothes, and shelter, 
the homely laws of gravitation, chemis- 
try and mechanics must be learned and 
obeyed; and every infraction of them, 
whether willful or through ignorance, is 
punished with remediless disaster. 
48 



THE EVIDENCE OF SENSE. 49 

But while the practical man builds 
houses, weaves cloth, plants fields, and 
minds the shop and mart, he is reminded 
in a thousand ways that nature around him 
is not fixed and final. He notes how 
Spring, the great magician, creates a new 
world out of clods and mold; how Sum- 
mer unfolds its myriad germs and paints 
the flora that Autumn turns to dust and 
blows away with a breath. He marks the 
changes of growth and waste in his own 
and other animal bodies. He learns that 
in the struggle for existence, he may 
employ thought as well as brute force, 
and by inventive skill put all the powers 
of nature under tribute to do his will. In 
moments of lofty contemplation he dis- 
cerns with Heraclitus, that " this restless, 
changing flux of things which never are, 
but are always becoming" points to a 
higher power behind the visible world, and 
leads him to distrust the evidence of his 
senses. As the murmur heard in a shell 
hints of the roar of the far off sea that was 
once its home, so the shifting panorama 
of nature, the instability of all mundane 
things, leads up to the conclusion that all 



50 MENTAL HEALING. 

matter is steeped in thought, and its qual- 
ities the registers of thought. 

" Let visions of the night or of the day 
Come, as they will ; and many a time they come, 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, 
This air that smites his forehead is not air, 
But vision, — yea, his very hand and foot — 
In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
And knows himself no vision to himself, 
Nor the high God a vision." 

If now we withdraw from the dusty- 
thoroughfares of toil and study nature, we 
perceive that the various objects on which 
the eyes rest cannot possibly have any 
existence without a mind to perceive them, 
or out of the mind which thinks about 
them. For what are the objects of the 
external world but the things which we 
perceive by the senses ? And what do 
we perceive besides our own sensations ? 

What we are wont to call the external 
world exists in the mind and nowhere 
else. We enter a room. It is inclosed by 
walls, and contains furniture, pictures, 
books and ornaments. These the senses 
call real things, because they may be seen 



THE THEORY OF KANT. 5 1 

and handled. But examine the evidence 
more closely. What is sight ? Simply a 
sensation reaching the mind through the 
eye. What is touch ? Simply a sen- 
sation conveyed to the mind through 
the fingers. All we have any knowledge 
of is the sensation, which is mental ; so 
that the world we consider to be outside 
of ourselves exists in our brain, and would 
otherwise be a perfect blank. This state- 
ment, however, must not be carried to 
absurd extremes ; for, as Bishop Berkeley 
well remarks : " Whenever bodies are 
said to have no existence without the 
mind, I would not be understood to mean 
this or that particular mind, but all minds 
whatsoever. It does not therefore follow 
that bodies are annihilated and created 
every moment, or exist not at all during the 
intervals between our perception of them." 
Realizing that the law of causation 
requires that mental sensations be pro- 
duced by something, Kant and his follow- 
ers assumed that there is a rational object, 
unknown and, in the nature of the case, 
unknowable, from which the sensation 
takes its origin. This final cause they 



52 MENTAL HEALING. 

called in their language Ding an sick, the 
thing in itself. This term philosophy 
has translated into the Greek compound 
nvumenon, that which is perceived; and 
its representation in consciousness, which 
is the sensation, they called phenomenon, 
an appearance. Finally in place of the 
unknown and unknowable noumenon, 
Berkeley and other idealists substituted 
spiritual substance, which is intelligence. 
The true position of one who holds the 
ideal theory of matter, at the present day, 
may be stated thus : The mind is con- 
scious of a certain number of congruent 
sensations, called objects, sounds, odors, 
or other qualities of matter. Being 
impotent to decide whether there is any- 
thing outside the mind corresponding to 
the sensations, he declines to say that 
objects exist absolutely and independently 
of thought, but declares them to be, as 
they appear to us, phenomena produced 
by something within him. 

In constructing a theory of matter, 
scientific Christianity avails itself of the 
doctrines of idealism already pointed out, 



IDEAS AND OBJECTS. 53 

and adopts the method of philosophy in 
the main. Beginning with the proposition 
that all substance is Spirit, and Spirit is 
all, the mental healer plants himself on the 
assertion that there can be only one sub- 
stance in the universe; therefore matter 
is not. substance, but reflection. 

The supreme cause of what are called 
material objects is idea. But it has 
already been shown that ideas, or intui- 
tions, are the prerogative of the spiritual 
man, and not of the man of the senses. 
It follows, therefore, that it is the spiritual 
man who sees, hears, smells, tastes, and 
feels. Mind, which belongs to the man 
of the senses, is the laboratory of thought, 
and thought has access to the bodily 
senses and organs. 

Keeping these distinctions clear before 
us, we observe that ideas constantly seek 
expression in thought; or, in other words, 
they flow through the mind. Hence there 
is something in the mind which is an 
emanation of ideas, and corresponds to 
ideas. If the mental functions be normal 
and harmonious, the emanation is perfect, 
and the correspondence exact. It is these 



54 MENTAL HEALING. 

emanations of ideas about which we think, 
and thought is forever striving to convert 
them into conclusions or facts. Facts are 
a product of thought, as cloth is a pro- 
duct of the loom. 

When thought perceives any object, as 
a tree or bird, there is something in the 
mind that corresponds to an idea held by 
the spiritual man, or the noumenon of the 
philosophers. The external reflection of 
this something in the mind, this mental 
perception, is what is called an object, and 
the reflections taken together constitute 
nature, or the material world. 

The plain conclusion is that everything 
exists in its relations to ideas. Matter 
has no existence apart from thought, and 
may be resolved into thought. The phi- 
losopher's "matter" is simply an abstrac- 
tion. " There is a sense," says Dr. C. C. 
Everett, in his work on " The Science of 
Thought," " in which water, ice, and vapor 
are the same ; yet they are very different. 
Water is not ice, neither is it vapor, 
though it is potentially both. The ab- 
stract chemical formula is the same for all. 
Water, ice, and vapor is each HO. So it 



UNIVERSAL THOUGHT. 55 

is with thought and the outer reality in 
their relations to one another. Neither is 
the other, yet each is at heart what the 
other is, and the formula for one is the 
formula for the other. " Granting the 
force of this illustration, the metaphysi- 
cian adds that thought contains all that is 
essential to matter, and matter is primarily 
thought. 

Nature : landscape and sky, sea and 
main, city and hamlet, animal and plant 
life, each and all reflect thought and are the 
product of thought ; not necessarily your 
thought or my thought, but of common 
or universal thought. And this truth 
should not be forgotten, for it is essential 
to a right conception of the subject. If a 
general statement be made that thought is 
the creator of our world or any particular 
object therein, the objector attempts to 
refute the argument with the assertion, 
that there are thousands of objects in exis- 
tence of which we could never have 
thought, may never have heard. But when 
the captious doubter has cited a single in- 
stance of concrete or abstract existence 
that proves not to have been originally a 



56 MENTAL HEALING. 

thought of somebody, it will be time 
enough to rally to the defense. Berkeley 
goes even farther in his concessions to his 
critics, and says to them : " I am content 
to put the whoie upon this issue: if you 
can but conceive it possible for one ex- 
tended movable object, or in general, for 
any one idea, or anything like an idea, to 
exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving 
ir, I shall readily give up the cause. . . . 
When we do our utmost to conceive the ex- 
istence of external bodies, we are all the 
while only contemplating our own ideas, " 

As a result of the theory herein pre- 
sented and explained we have the follow- 
ing brief formula: Intelligence descends 
into the spiritual man as ideas; ideas 
descend into the mind provoking thought; 
thought is reflected as matter and its 
phenomena. 

Matter and its phenomena being con- 
cepts and external reflections of finite 
thought, partake of the qualities and limi- 
tations of the medium through which they 
pass. To secure a faithful photograph of 
the original, the artist must have his 
instrument in perfect working order, and 



NATURE A REFLECTION. 57 

the plate that is to receive the impression 
nicely sensitized. If the mental concepts 
which emanate from ideas are to corre- 
spond perfectly, and if the reflections of 
thought as matter are to be faithful, the 
delicate laboratory of thought must be in 
perfect working order, 

"That mind and soul according well, 
May make one music. " 

The considerations here urged upon the 
attention lead irresistibly to the conclu- 
sion that the outlying world as it appears 
to us, as well as our own material bodies, 
is like that impalpable semblance of an 
object thrown back by a mirror or a sheet 
of water. Our objective world is as truly 
a return of ourselves to ourselves as is 
the reflection of the glass before which we 
stand. We smile at the fable of the dog 
which dropped his bone and attacked his 
own reflection in the stream ; but do we 
not repeat this canine folly w T hen, aban- 
doning reality, we put our trust in the 
illusions of material sense ? 

If man's being were a harmonious 
whole, the correspondence of his mind to 



58 MENTAL HEALING. 

ideas and the reflection of his thought 
would be perfect, and all material forms 
proceeding from him would be beautiful 
and true. Indeed, there was doubtless a 
period in the history of the human race 
when these conditions were actually ful- 
filled, when nature and the physical body, 
mind and spirit, were in harmony. The 
traditions and sacred writings of all 
nations allude to a primitive type of 
man who was colossal and had power 
over nature and every created thing. 
Like the world famous Merlin, all the 
elemental forces were his loyal vassals ; 
he brought things to pass by magic 
instead of toil, and could assume any 
material form, or become invisible at 
will. 

" Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit 
alters, molds, makes it. The immobility 
or bruteness of nature is the absence of 
spirit ; to pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, 
it is obedient. . . . Every spirit builds 
itself a house; and beyond its house a 
world ; and beyond its world a heaven. 
. . . What we are that only can we 
see. " — Emerson. 



MATTER A REFLECTION. 59 

Matter is the reflection of ourselves, 
modified by thought. There is a sub- 
stantial idea known to the spiritual man, 
to which each material object or thing 
corresponds. In nature we see the reflec- 
tion of our thought; thought corresponds 
to the generating idea or intellection. 
Material forms are more or less exact 
imitations of what exists as substance; 
and each organ of the human body corre- 
sponds to something in the spiritual man. 
Frivolous jesters make themselves merry 
over this doctrine of the ideal philosophy, 
by carrying it to a literal extreme. But 
it must not be forgotten that what appears 
to the bodily senses as form, exists to the 
spiritual man as law. Jesus truly said, 
" Spirit hath not flesh and bones. " 

The questions naturally arise : Are 
mental and bodily defects reflections of 
incomplete or impotent thought ? And 
how are we to account for puny or incap- 
able thinking, if the spiritual man be all- 
puissant ? 

Theologians have tried to solve this 
problem by inventing an abstraction called 



60 MENTAL HEALING. 

evil ; and the gifted poet Milton mourn- 
fully sings 

" Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world, and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden." 

But this monster of their own creating 
has caught them in a dilemma from which 
they are unable to extricate themselves. 
From all such delusions it is the privilege 
of the student of metaphysics to turn away, 
and find a true and satisfying answer in 
a knowledge of the science of being. 

The answer to the second question 
should be given first: it is simply the 
affirmation that the spiritual man posses- 
ses all the attributes that belong to Sub- 
stance or Intelligence. Being such, the 
ideas that descend into the mind as con- 
cepts are perfect, and can be nothing else. 
The defect is surely not in the spiritual 
man or any emanation of spirit. 

To the senses the processes of thinking, 
the bodily organs, and nature in general 
are defective. They are not true reflec- 
tions of pure concepts, and the man is not 



REALITY AND APPEARANCE. 6 1 

in harmony with himself. To the spir- 
itual man, on the contrary, there are no 
such defects, and no discord mars the 
serene harmony of being. How is this 
difference to be explained ? The solution 
is not far to seek. 

The spiritual man is reality; the man 
of the senses is only an appearance. One 
is positive, the other negative ; one knows, 
the other reflects ; one is substance, the 
other corresponds to substance ; one is 
life, the other a mode of expressing that 
life ; one is power, the other an organ of 
power; one is divinely perfect, the other 
fallible; one is infinite, the other finite. 

Defect, that is, the want or lack of 
something necessary to perfection, is the 
distinguishing characteristic of the man 
we see. We cannot trust his judgment, 
because he does not know; we cannot 
trust his will, because he has no power; 
we cannot trust his conduct, because he 
has no virtue. He is limited on all sides, 
and is simply the negative expression of 
all that constitutes the true man. 

What then is it that has come to be 
recognized as evil? It is simply absence 



62 MENTAL HEALING. 

of good, — the blank occasioned by with- 
drawing the light; the chill by which the 
lack of heat is detected ; the sense of suf- 
focation when free air is excluded. 

More than two thousand years ago the 
essence of the theory herein advanced was 
announced by Plato, and is thus skillfully 
summarized by George Henry Lewes : 

" The phenomena which constitute what 
we perceive of the world (that is, the world 
of sense) are but resemblances of matter 
to ideas. In other words, Ideas are the 
forms of which material Things are cop- 
ies; the noumena, of which all that we 
perceive (by the senses) are the Appear- 
ances {phenomena). But we must not 
suppose these copies to be exact ; they do 
not at all participate in the nature of their 
models ; they do not even represent them, 
otherwise than in a superficial manner. 
Or perhaps it would be more correct to 
say, that Ideas do not resemble Things ; 
the man does not resemble his portrait, 
although the portrait may be a tolerable 
resemblance of him ; a resemblance of his 
aspect, not of his nature." 



IV. 



DISEASK. 

In our consideration of disease it is not 
necessary to enter into any fine-spun, 
lengthy definition of the term, nor need 
we trouble ourselves with the classifica- 
tion on which physicians rely. Pathology 
concerns the body, where the ailment 
appears, and helps to locate it. But to 
the mental healer what the doctor names 
disease and its physiological cause are 
alike effects with which he need not 
meddle. He looks beyond all these to 
the real cause in thought, and addresses 
his treatment to that. For him, therefore, 
the most general and inclusive definition 
is the best. 

Ease, as we all know, means freedom 
from pain, trouble, and annoyance of any 
kind; absence of anything that ruffles or 
frets either mind or body ; it is a state of 
tranquillity. Disease is precisely the 
opposite of ease. It is the condition when 
63 



64 MENTAL HEALING. 

tranquillity is disturbed in any way. The 
mental healer does not .care by what med- 
ical name the distress is known ; it may be 
nervousness, dyspepsia, asthma, fever, — 
words all alike to him, since the effects 
they denote are simply reflections or 
registers of wrong thinking. 

But while technical terms signify little 
in the science and art of mental cure, it is 
of importance to get and retain a firm 
grasp of the thought that the real man is 
not diseased, cannot be, and knows nothing 
about it. " It is only the finite that has 
wrought and suffered ; the infinite lies 
stretched in smiling repose." What is 
called disease is one of the defects belong- 
ing to the realm of thought and its phe- 
nomena; and it is to the senses alone that 
man ever seems to be sick. 

How, then, is disease, which seems so 
real, to be explained ? 

The spiritual man, as we have already 
learned, is intelligence ; to him belong all 
the perfections ascribed to Deity. So 
intimate is the relation of the two, that we 
cannot separate them in our thought, or 
tell where God, the Supreme Author, 



INVERTED THOUGHT. 65 

ceases, and Man, the Idea of God, begins. 
The true Man is not a personality, but 
life, knowledge, power, descending into 
the laboratory of mind. But though the 
primal man did not separate himself in 
thought from God, the metaphysician 
holds that he did at length come to think 
that intelligence was his own, to have and 
to use. Not that the spiritual, or real, 
man changed, and appropriated what did 
not belong to him ; but thought, which 
was very powerful so long as it corre- 
sponded to idea, assumed itself to be an 
independent power, and asserted authority 
over the senses. This was inverted 
thought; or, more literally, thought turned 
over, turned upside down. 

As soon, therefore, as the man of 
thought or the senses began to think he 
was something of himself, mind was no 
longer a pure emanation of spirit, a me- 
dium of all intelligence; but lack of knowl- 
edge, limitation, led man to think as of 
himself. Out of this sprang the belief 
in personality, and the reflection of his 
thought became fixed, and crystalized into 
material form. 



66 MENTAL HEALING. 

This inverted thinking once established, 
man soon forgot that he was godlike, and 
made the discovery that he was no longer 
protected in his uprightness, but was 
exposed to dangers, seen and unseen, and 
liable to be hurt. This was the origin of 
fear, and fear is the parent of all the ills 
that flesh is heir to. The spiritual man 
knows nothing of fear, because he is su- 
perior to all and recognizes no other 
power. The man of the senses creates 
his own enemies. 

From what has been said, it becomes 
plain that bodily disease is simply the 
reflection of inverted thought ; and if 
thought itself be wrong, the phenomenon 
or visible manifestation of thought will 
also be wrong; so that it is literally true 
that all disease is the working out of dis- 
turbed or imperfect thought in the tissues 
and functions of the body. 

A case may be cited to illustrate the 
meaning: A middle-aged man who has 
suffered many years with chronic rheuma- 
tism, until it is torture for him to move, 
has also an excitable temper, a despotic 



CAUSE AND EFFECT. 6*] 

will, and is so intolerant that he cannot 
abide opposition, but flies into a towering 
rage if he is crossed. He has had many 
physicians who ascribe the painful inflam- 
mation of his joints to an improper secre- 
tion of uric acid; and his nervousness 
and irritability are easily accounted for 
by the prolonged suffering he has en- 
dured. This case presents the same 
conditions to the mental healer, but his 
conclusions are different. To him the 
bodily trouble is a reflection or effect of 
lack of mental ease ; and the unamiable 
nature results from a dominant feeling 
that other people are enemies seeking to 
oppose the poor man's wishes and thwart 
his plans. In treating the case, the doc- 
tor addresses remedies to the disturbed 
secretions which are an effect, while the 
mental healer directs his to the primary 
cause which is fear. 

It may not in every case be as easy to 
trace effect to cause, as it is in the one 
here given. The fear is not always read- 
ily discerned. Nor should it be forgotten 
that between mental fear and physical 
disease the relation is often very subtle 



68 MENTAL HEALING. 

and easily missed. That there is a caus- 
ing fear wherever disease is present is 
made certain on other grounds, even if 
we fail to detect it in every specific 
instance. For the grand defect of the 
man of the senses is that he is aware of 
limitation, and this very weakness makes 
him conscious of danger and a liability to 
harm. The man of inverted thought is 
afraid, because he does not know. 

A little reflection convinces us that 
fear plays a large part in mental expe- 
rience. " In the affairs of life," says the 
author of " Bread Pills," " men consult 
their fears more than they do their hopes ; 
they are afraid, not only of the impalpable 
pestilence that walketh in darkness and 
the destruction that wasteth at noon-day, 
but of a thousand impending calamities, 
supposed to lie in wait for them. The 
prosperous fear the loss of wealth ; the 
poor dread the wolf that haunts their 
door; the robust are afraid of accident, 
and the delicate are alarmed at the men- 
ace of disease ; the child shrinks from 
punishment, and the aged shudder before 
the King of Terrors. Men even project 



FEAR. 69 

their thoughts beyond the grave, and are 
appalled by a fearful looking for of judg- 
ment and fiery indignation in the world 
of ghosts. Indeed, so habituated is the 
mind to apprehension, that men look 
for evil from every source ; as though 
calamity were their birthright, and pros- 
perity a prize to be wrenched from the 
teeth of ill luck and failure by sheer 
violence. 

" The case were surely bad enough if 
the poor (human) child learned no worse 
ills than those which menace the physical 
world. But fond parents and conscien- 
tious teachers hasten to let loose upon him 
a whole menagerie of moral bugbears and 
goblins. Then the merciless hordes of 
doubt, worry, gossip, deceit, envy, hate, 
anger, malice, revenge and slander, de- 
scend upon him with cruel ferocity. Su- 
perstition haunts him with maleficent 
demons and fiends ; he is menaced by bad 
fairies, scared by ghosts, appalled by spec- 
tres, upbraided by conscience, scourged 
by remorse, filled with abject terror of his 
god, tempted by his devil, in despair of his 
heaven, aghast at his hell." 



70 MENTAL HEALING. 

Disease, as a condition to which any 
individual of the human race is liable, 
exists in the common, or universal mind. 
The law that physical exhaustion, ex- 
posure and contagion are likely to produce 
illness has been established by common 
thought, and influences all mankind. A 
particular disease that prostrates you may 
not originate in your thought, but in the 
mind of some one else. A young child 
may be made sick by the anxiety of the 
mother. We live in an atmosphere op- 
pressed with a belief in the danger of 
disease on every hand. Disease is im- 
posed on the race as a birthright. We 
commit the folly of the ancient Mexicans, 
who, as soon as an infant was born, 
shrieked in his unconscious ears : " Child, 
thou art come into the world to endure, 
suffer, and say nothing ! " 

The study of human anatomy, physi- 
ology, and hygiene acquaints the medical 
man with the structure and functions of 
the body, and enables him to detect the 
presence of disease, construct laws of 
health, and prescribe the penalty for 
breaking them. But if such knowledge is 



THE TRUE LAW. /I 

power in the hands of the skillful physi- 
cian, it likewise enslaves both him and 
his patients, by fixing in their thought a 
legion of hitherto undiscovered dangers 
that threaten the physical well being, and 
the fear that they may transgress an in- 
exorable code at any moment. The 
inevitable consequence of popularizing 
such studies by introducing them into the 
common schools, though by no means 
intended, is to fill the common mind with 
apprehensions of evil, from which it 
might better be exempt. Is it a good 
thing to know a hundred laws that are 
not obeyed, if thereby we multiply the 
very fears that engender disease ? 

The true and the only law on this 
subject, that it is necessary for us to know, 
is that if Spirit, the eternal power, has 
need of the reflection we term the human 
body, that body cannot suffer harm. And 
it may be useful to inquire who made the 
laws of hygiene, and on what authority do 
they rest ? Are they anything else than 
the voice of finite mind asserting itself 
against the infinite ? The whole super- 
structure of medicine crumbles and falls 



J2 MENTAL HEALING. 

to the ground, when we know that the 
body and all its diseases are simply phe- 
nomena of the material senses and finite 
thought, while the real man who is spirit 
knows nothing of them. It is a sufficient 
answer when arraigned at the bar of 
physical law to reply that, since matter 
has no life, and disease is not a reality 
but an illusion, your laws are inoperative 
and a dead letter, except so far as they 
have the effect to scare the timid. Once 
assured that you are the power and disease 
is a fiction, eternal truth will be a wall of 
adamant around you, to guard you from 
every harm. 

We can scarcely realize the tyranny 
of the senses under which the world 
groans. So long has this usurper held the 
throne of reason and been acknowledged 
as an authority, that it is no easy task to 
depose him, and recognize once more the 
rightful king. Reduced to its simplest 
form, the question is one of veracity. 
The senses say matter can suffer pain ; 
God says matter is insensible. The 
senses declare a man sick ; God says the 
real man knows nothing of disease. The 



HEREDITARY DISEASE. 73 

senses make laws of health and affix sick- 
ness and death as penalties for breaking 
them ; God says man is spirit and health 
is harmony. " The God whom we serve 
is a God of health," said Rev. F. D. 
Maurice, "the enemy of sickness and 
death." 

When we come to see that all disease 
exists in the mind as disturbed or inverted 
thought, the classification of diseases 
becomes as useless and artificial as are 
the laws of health made by the students 
of medicine. But since these distinctions 
have become firmly fixed in the common 
mind, it may be well to speak of some of 
them. 

Diseases believed to be transmitted 
from parent to child are called hereditary. 
These the mental healer usually finds it 
difficult to deal with, because of the strong 
prevailing belief that tendencies and traits 
acquired at birth are stereotyped and per- 
manent. How this came to be the case 
is easily understood: children seldom or 
never lose the external and distinctive 
marks received from their parents, but 



74 MENTAL HEALING. 

retain whatever of family resemblance 
they may have shown in infancy. Reason- 
ing from analogy, people naturally con- 
cluded that if the external likeness of off- 
spring to parent is so lasting, the same 
thing must be true of that which is trans- 
mitted through the blood. But no one 
who understands the unreality of what is 
called disease will think for a moment 
that it can ever be inherited, or that it can 
resist the power of truth on account of 
the popular theory of heredity. 

Contagious and infectious diseases are 
so simply because the common thought 
has made them so, and the same is true of 
poisons. These influences could have no 
power to affect the body except through 
thought, for all disease exists in thought, 
and involves the tissues of the body only 
as fast and as far as mind determines to 
let it. Any man who thoroughly believes 
this statement might be exposed to con- 
tagion and malaria without the slightest 
danger of harm, or might even swallow 
poison and take no hurt. Dr. Al Watts 
believes that the bite of a rabid dog will 
have no more effect upon his flesh than 



ALL DISEASE MENTAL. 7$ 

an equally severe bite of a healthy dog, 
and has repeatedly put his faith to the 
test. 

Another grave distinction insisted on by 
the doctors is destroyed by the knowledge 
that all disease is in thought. They dis- 
criminate between mental and physical 
disease, and call the former by the name 
insanity. But we see that a consumptive 
or dyspeptic is quite as insane as a luna- 
tic, since each is deluded by the creations 
of his own brain, and each must be cured 
in the same way, if his recovery is genuine. 
The only real difference between indiges- 
tion and a disorder of the brain, as the men- 
tal healer regards them, is in conduct; but 
one is a cheat of the senses quite as much 
as the other, and in either case the real 
man, who is spiritual, is always sane. 



SIN AND DEATH. 

The word Sin is a term created by 
theologians to denote a class of departures 
from moral rectitude commonly consid- 
ered transgressions of the law of God ; dis- 
obedience of divine commands ; or any 
violation of God's will, either in purpose 
or conduct. As usually understood it 
covers more than the defects that belong 
to the man of the senses, for it assumes 
all human beings to be accountable for 
their choice of good or evil, and therefore 
applies to acts of volition. 

Scientific Christianity does not recog- 
nize the definition of theology, but holds 
that, strictly speaking, there is no sin. It 
is not necessary to admit that any man 
intends to go astray; and what is called 
sin exists only in thought which has be- 
come inverted; for right thinking corre- 
sponds to ideas, and cannot depart from 
the truth. The spiritual man, then, does 
7 6 



UNSOUND DOGMAS. 77 

not regard iniquity in his heart, or diso- 
bey the commandments of God. But 
while this science does not give counte- 
nance to any unsound dogmas concern- 
ing man's moral condition, it regards the 
moral as well as the physical defects of the 
man of the senses as proper subjects of 
treatment, and because sin is the name by 
which they are usually recognized, speaks 
of them as such. 

We have already seen how man, by 
assuming knowledge and power to be his 
own, thought himself into a false position, 
and established what seemed to his in- 
verted thought an independent life for the 
physical body. Carrying this deflection 
still farther, he imagined himself to be 
separate from the divine, and held God as 
an enemy, as the Bible declares : " The 
natural heart is at enmity against God, is 
not subject to His law, neither can be. " 
Having taken this attitude, the ancient 
Hebrews regarded Jehovah as a despotic, 
arbitrary ruler, who loves and rewards his 
loyal subjects, but hates his enemies, and 
punishes both them and their children 
with implacable ferocity. 



?8 MENTAL HEALING. 

The dread of sovereign vengeance 
which such a view inspired caused man to 
invent a code of arbitrary laws, which he 
declared to be the utterances of the terri- 
ble Jehovah, who had affixed a fearful 
penalty for the violation of each and every 
command. No love, no fatherly tender- 
ness for his children entered into this 
inverted picture of the relations existing 
between the all-powerful Creator and his 
creatures on earth, — it was an irrespon- 
sible tyrant, wroth with his disobedient 
subjects ; and helpless, ignorant vassals, 
trembling and cringing at his feet. 

It is needless to add that we have been 
describing a picture drawn by inverted 
thought, and no concept of a true, harmo- 
nious man. It is the horrible dream of 
the man of the senses, wandering away 
from his Father's house, and feeling him- 
self estranged and unprotected. This 
wretched distortion, this absolute perver- 
sion of the divine truth of being, is the 
prolific source of all the fears that haunt 
man with forebodings of impending evil, 
and of the entire catalogue of self-created 
errors that theology calls sin. And yet 



THE CURE OF SIN. 79 

there is nothing in all this that alters the 
fact that God is good, is love, and has 
made all His works with infinite perfec- 
tion ; that the real man is spirit, cannot 
be separated from God, and has no fear of 
danger or knowledge of sin. 

The only aspect of sin with which men- 
tal healing is concerned is its cure. Con- 
sidered as it appears to the senses, each 
wrong or inverted thought, each transgres- 
sion of what is called the law of God has 
its material reflection in the body as dis- 
ease. It has already been stated that all 
disease is engendered by fear ; the con- 
verse is also true that all inverted thought 
is reflected in the body. Every kind of 
ignorance, selfishness, and crime is in- 
cluded in the catalogue of causes of phys- 
ical disturbance : Bigotry, fanaticism, 
superstition, idolatry, hypocrisy, impiety, 
profanity, ingratitude, injustice, revenge, 
contempt, jealousy, sarcasm, fault finding, 
scandal, slander, indiscretion, excess, in- 
temperance, dissipation, concupiscence, 
perfidy, passion, vice, enmity, ill temper, 
asperity, hate, anger, fret, rage, malice, 
rancor, cruelty, brutality, abuse, worry, 



80 MENTAL HEALING. 

misanthropy, and a thousand other forms 
of discord, assert themselves in bodily dis- 
orders. So surely is this true, that an 
intelligent healer pays no heed to the 
alleged disease with which a sufferer 
claims to be afflicted, except so far as it is 
a sign of a lack of mental harmony that 
caused it. It may not always be possible 
to determine just what peculiar shade of 
wrong thinking has registered itself in the 
diseased body; but since sickness and 
pain are produced by thought and in no 
other way, the healer can safely rely on 
the law of cause and effect in every case. 

The next topic for consideration is 
readily suggested by what has just been 
stated. Healing which goes no further 
than the cure of the bodily ailment is no 
healing at all. It is like the superficial 
healing over of a sore in the flesh, which 
to the practiced eye of the surgeon is a 
sign of morbid and not of healthy action. 
It is an attempt to cleanse the stream 
while the impurities in the fountain are 
suffered to remain. There can be no 
sound health unless the cause is reached 
and mental harmony is restored. Hence 



COMMON THOUGHT. 8 1 

it is that the terms " mental healing " and 
" mind cure " derive their significance ; 
for the change that is wrought in every 
case of genuine work, reaches beyond the 
reflected disturbance in the body, which is 
dis-ease, to the wrong thinking in the 
mind, which is lack of harmony. 

Growing out of this discussion of what 
is termed sin is another phase of the sub- 
ject, that is of great importance in healing. 
The law of common thought already ex- 
plained shows that the particular cause of 
disease may not exist in the sufferer's 
individual mind, but in the common 
thought, or the mind of another person. 
A mother's fear may be reflected in the 
body of her child ; a doctor's fear may be 
reflected in the body of his patient; the 
fear of an infectious or contagious disease 
prevailing in the community may be re- 
flected in the bodies of those who contract 
the disease. 

Because of the action of common 
thought and the law of reflection here 
insisted on, every person is liable to be 
influenced for better or for worse, by those 



82 MENTAL HEALING. 

with whom he associates or is brought 
into contact in any way. Especially is it 
true that our health may be seriously 
affected by the thought of those about us, 
so long as we remain unprotected and un- 
guarded. 

So far as we know, thought is the 
chosen medium through which spirit 
power manifests itself to the senses of 
man. The influence of mind over mind 
is, therefore, very potent, whether the 
thought exerted be normal or inverted. 
Right thinking is life and health to mind 
and body, diffusing around him who exerts 
it an atmosphere of harmony and healing 
virtue. Inverted thinking kills all true 
life, disturbs both mind and body, and 
reflects the image of disease on all matter 
within the circle of its influence. Wrong 
thought may be termed " mind-kill " ; 
right thought, " mind-cure." 

The time is coming when people will 
understand that the mental atmosphere in 
which they live has as much to do with 
health as does the condition of the air they 
breathe. The value of nutritious diet, 
cleanliness and pure air is beyond dispute, 



THOUGHT ATMOSPHERE. 83 

though one may exist where these are 
lacking. The value of an atmosphere of 
right thought on the part of those with 
whom our lives are associated is immeas- 
urably greater, with this difference : it 
cannot be dispensed with without the 
most serious consequences. The reason 
why the force of this remark is not appre- 
ciated is because there is no one living 
who knows by experience what would be 
the effect of having all that others think 
about him normal and harmonious. 

It startles us to be told that the famil- 
iar dictum, " All men are mortal," is sim- 
ply a law made by inverted thought, and 
not an eternal fact. But the logic of the 
theory of life herein announced leads to 
such a conclusion. Originally man knew 
himself to be heir to eternal life. Then, 
when the man of the senses had assumed 
an independent personality for himself, 
and finding that personal self unprotected, 
began to be afraid he should be hurt, he 
thought also that the forces of nature and 
his enemies had power to destroy his life. 
This established to the senses the fear and 



84 MENTAL HEALING. 

the fact of death. Incongruous as the 
statement is in reality, so accustomed 
have our ears become to it, that it excites 
no surprise to hear the distorted perver- 
sion of the truth uttered, that man must 
pass through the gate of death in order to 
attain immortal life. 

To the inverted thought of the senses 
all experience proves death to be the end 
of material existence, and the entrance, as 
faith would have us hope, to endless life. 
The universal decease of animal and veg- 
etable life and the decay of material forms 
are the stubborn " facts," on which the 
senses base the theory of mortality. Yet, 
in spite of the prevailing belief, the delu- 
sive silence is often broken by strong 
voices crying : " Whoso liveth and believ- 
eth in me, shall never die ! " 

" There is no death ; 
What seems so is transition ! " 

Scientific Christianity announces in 
unmistakable accents the joyful doctrine 
of eternal life. There is but one life. 
The real man cannot die, and the man of 
the inverted senses will at length be trans- 



TRUE RESURRECTION. 85 

formed in the image and likeness of the 
ever living, perfect One. " This corrupt- 
ible must put on incorruption, and this 
mortal must put on immortality," wrote 
Paul the Apostle, many centuries ago. 
As we become restored to health and 
soundness, we outgrow the gross notion 
that man is mortal, and put on the true 
immortality day by day. 

The true gospel of the resurrection is 
not the resumption of animal life after a 
human body has been laid away for ages 
in the sleep of death. " I am the resur- 
rection and the life," said Jesus. As we 
rise out of the darkness and death of finite 
thought, we take on spiritual life and 
knowledge which are eternal ; a change 
brought about, not by the decease of the 
body, but by the purification of thought. 
Our resurrection day is the time when 
we ascend into the sunlight of eternal 
harmony. 



VI. 

HEALING. 

In the preceding chapters the theoret- 
ical ground on which mental healing is 
based has been considered. It begins 
with the conception of God as Spirit, Soul, 
Substance, the only Intelligence, Life, and 
eternal Energy of the world. This is the 
Fact of all facts ; the " moral order of the 
universe;" the final cause of all that is, 
and to which all that is must be referred. 

Intelligence or Spirit constantly mani- 
fests itself in form, — descends as the idea 
we call the spiritual man, the image of 
God, and the possessor of knowledge and 
life. This, the real, man, being an idea of 
God, has its correspondence in thought, 
which belongs to the man of the senses; 
and the reflection of thought in external 
nature and the physical body constitutes 
the material world. Right thinking legiti- 
mately produces entire harmony between 
the spiritual idea, the correspondence, and 



WHAT IS HEALING? 87 

the reflection. But the mental healer is 
brought into contact with inverted thought, 
and has to deal with its legitimate conse- 
quences, which to the senses appear as 
disease, sin, and death. To be fitted for 
his work it is necessary for him to 
thoroughly consider and understand what 
he proposes to do. 

Mental healing, considered as an act, 
prompts the question, What is it to heal ? 
Considered as a result, we naturally ask, 
What is a mental cure ? The first ques- 
tion is subjective, and relates to the power 
and means by which health is restored; 
the other is objective and concerns the 
person who is made well. 

The power that heals is Spirit, because 
there is no other power in the universe; 
this is a clear deduction in the premises, 
that no amount of words can make any 
plainer. The means through which the 
healing power works seem to be various ; 
but we will first consider those with which 
the mental healer is directly concerned. 

It is indispensable to success in healing 
that the person who practices the act be 



88 MENTAL HEALING. 

in a proper condition. The nearer he 
approaches that point where he realizes 
the omnipotence of Spirit, and rises su- 
preme to the suggestions of the senses, the 
better ; for he can do no good work so long 
as his own mind is infested with doubts. 
For the time being, the healer acts for his 
patient, thinks for him, grasps and holds 
the truth for him. If these conditions are 
fulfilled, so that the healer rises supreme 
to the illusions of the senses, and sees the 
physical man he is treating only as an 
appearance, while the real man is clearly 
recognized, the inverted thought of the 
patient is changed, so that spirit power 
affects him and he is healed. 

What the healer does for the person 
he treats is to assist him to change his 
thought; for in every case, no matter 
what may seem to be the trouble with the 
patient, it is the inverted thought, the 
belief in the reality of disease, that stands 
in the way of recovery. Once change his 
thought, and spirit power conquers his 
delusion and he becomes well. Remember 
that the disease exists in the mind; its 
cause is there ; a change of thought de- 



TRUTH HEALS. 8<? 

stroys the cause, and makes the man 
whole, because there is no longer any in- 
verted thought to reflect. 

To put the explanation in other words, 
we may say : The healer by his right 
thought works on and overcomes the 
thought of fear in the mind of the patient. 
He thus suggests to the patient that he is 
not sick but is well. And why does that 
convince the patient? Simply because 
the healer is right and the patient is mis- 
taken. Truth is stronger than error, and 
the actual contact of the two opposites 
invariably results in the triumph of the 
greater. To insure the desired result, 
however, the healer must first be thor- 
oughly convinced of the truth he seeks to 
establish in the thought of his patient, 
so that not a shadow of doubt flits through 
his own mind ; for if he but partially 
relies on the truth himself, the benefit 
will be only partial. But when the healer 
attains the necessary condition, the vital 
spark of truth instantly passes to the mind 
of the patient under treatment, and he, 
too, is convinced ( or converted ) and 
healed. 



90 MENTAL HEALING. 

If this be the correct view of healing as 
an act, it is evident that, strictly speaking, 
the person we call the healer or curer, 
does not perform any cure at all, but all 
healing is self-healing. It is the patient 
who experiences a change of thought, a 
conversion, that prompts him to avail 
himself of the healing power, by letting 
Spirit, which is health, have its way 
through him. The change takes place 
in him, and nowhere else. We must not 
lose sight of the fact that all the healer 
can do is to help the patient to change his 
thought; the true healing act is between 
the power that heals and the person cured, 
a sacred transaction with which no third 
party can intermeddle. 

Since a change of the inverted thought 
of the sick person is all that can be pro- 
duced by extraneous influence, the treat- 
ment of a professional healer is not the 
only means of securing it. While a 
majority of cases are affected in that way, 
there are well attested instances to show 
that anything that will enable the sick 
person to change his thought, may put 
him in a condition to receive spiritual 



ALL CAN BE CURED. 9I 

healing. A text from Scripture or some 
other writings may be brought to his mind 
with such force as to do this, or some 
sudden event may startle him out of his 
chronic delusion. 

It is in this way alone that we can 
account for cures that seem to result from 
prayer, a resort to relics, charms, and 
other things believed to possess peculiar 
virtue. This is why good results follow 
any one of the thousand absurd acts, by 
the performance of which superstitious 
and credulous people seek to be restored 
to health. 

Many mental healers admit, and no 
doubt believe, that it is not possible to 
treat successfully until the patient comes 
into the right attitude ; that he may by 
setting up a direct opposition prevent the 
most powerful healer from reaching his 
case and doing him any good. This is a 
mistake, a result of inverted thinking on 
the part of the mental healer, for which he 
should be treated and of which he should 
be cured. If, when treating, the meta- 
physician reflects omnipotence, no patient 
can resist its Divine influence. When he 



92 ' MENTAL HEALING. 

fails of success, he has failed to reflect the 
unlimited power. 

In answer to the second question : 
Considered as a result, what is a cure? 
there would seem to be but one possible 
reply, in view of what has already been 
explained concerning the nature of the 
healing act. A mental cure is the dis- 
covery made by a sick person that he is 
well. It is not convalescence, a growing 
strong, after a period of prostration, a 
gradual restoration of vigor or abatement 
of pain ; the effect produced, whatever it 
may be, is instantaneous, and comes to 
the knowledge of the patient as a dis- 
covered fact, and not as a gradual process 
of recovery. 

" After its own law and not by arith- 
metic is the rate of the soul's progress to 
be computed. The soul's advances are 
not made by gradation, such as can be 
represented by motion in a straight line ; 
but rather by ascension of state, such as 
can be represented by metamorphosis, — 
from the egg to the worm, from the worm 
to the fly. . . . With each divine 



THE USE OF MEDICINE. 93 

impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of 
the visible and finite, and comes out into 
eternity." — Emerson. 

In this connection it may be profitable 
to speak of the use of medicine and other 
means, instead of relying on true meta- 
physical healing. What is the proper 
attitude of the mental healer toward med- 
icine, manipulation, electrical treatment, 
mesmerism, mediumship, and conformity 
to hygienic laws ? Are these means of 
cure of any value ? and should they be 
resorted to in connection with mental 
treatment ? 

It is safe to say that if drugs, manipula- 
tion, and the other methods of treatment 
enable a practitioner to do his patient 
some good, true mental healing would 
enable him to do much more; for while 
these are liable to fail, spirit power, being 
the sole power, and source of all power, is 
sure. Medicine helps only so far as it is 
believed in ; but being a material remedy 
addressed to a material man, its use serves 
to divert attention from the only power 
that can heal, and to confirm a belief that 



94 MENTAL HEALING. 

there is independent power and life in 
material things. The healing potency of 
drugs and every other therapeutic agent 
that appeals to the senses is derived 
through the established belief that such 
things cure. Medicine is freighted with 
thought, so to speak, the thought that it 
will heal ; the physician who prescribes it, 
the pharmacist who compounds it, the 
nurse who administers it, the patient who 
takes it, all feel that it will produce the 
desired effect. 

The not uncommon notion that drugs 
possess absolute, inherent curative virtues 
of their own involves an error. Arnica, 
quinine, opium, could not produce the 
effects ascribed to them except by imputed 
virtue. Men think they will act thus on 
the physical system, consequently they do. 
The property of alcohol is to intoxicate; 
but if the common thought had endowed 
it simply with a nourishing quality like 
milk, it would produce a similar effect. 

A curious question arises about the 
origin of healing virtues, if it be admitted 
that all drugs were originally destitute of 
them. We can conceive of a time in the 



THE VIRTUE OF DRUGS. 95 

mental history of the race when no thera- 
peutic value was assigned to certain drugs, 
when, in fact, it was not known that they 
possessed any. How did it come to pass 
that common thought, or any thought, 
endowed them with healing virtue, in the 
first place? Simply in this way: Man 
finding himself unprotected, and liable to 
be hurt by the elements in the midst of 
which he lived, forgot the true source of 
healing, and began to seek earnestly for 
material remedies for disease and wounds. 
The desire for something led to experi- 
ments ; and with each trial there was 
associated the hope that the means applied 
would prove efficacious. Then what was 
at first an earnest hope came at length to 
be a belief ; and thus, by gradual steps, a 
belief in the contents of the entire phar- 
macopoeia was established. 

That it is the belief in the virtue of the 
drug, rather than the medicine prescribed, 
no one knows better than the physician, 
who often has his most signal success with 
cases where no real medicine is admin- 
istered. Every doctor understands the 
value of what is termed placebo, that is, a 



g6 MENTAL HEALING. 

counterfeit or sham prescription of no 
potency whatever, given merely to quiet 
the patient, and cause him to believe that 
something is being done for his ailment. 
" Belief can kill ; belief can cure," is a 
maxim as true as it is old. 

This position finds ample illustration in 
the history of patent medicines, which do 
not succeed in one case in ten, because of 
any medicinal properties they possess, but 
because they are persistently advertised; 
and the well-known story of the scurvy 
cure invented by the Prince of Orange is 
a fair sample of hundreds of anecdotes 
that might be related, to show that faith 
in drugs is more efficacious than medicine. 
At the siege of Buda, in 1625, when the 
garrison was on the point of surrendering 
that stronghold to the investing army, in 
consequence of the prevalence of scurvy 
in an aggravated form, the Prince of 
Orange availed himself of the common 
faith in placebos to produce a remedy. 
He caused a few bottles of sham medicine 
to be distributed among the sick soldiers, 
as a sovereign and infallible specific for 
the disease. A few drops of this harmless 



ILLUSTRATION. 9/ 

liquid produced the most astonishing 
effects. Men who had not moved their 
limbs for months were seen walking the 
streets, sound, straight, and whole; and 
many, who declared they had only been 
made worse by the treatment previously 
received, recovered in a few days. 



VII. 

TREATMENT. 

Ability to treat disease successfully im- 
plies a clear, adequate understanding of 
the subjects considered in these pages, 
and an intelligent and skillful application 
of them to a definite end. In order to 
heal yourself and others, it is not enough 
to be intellectually convinced that the 
theory of mental science is correct, there 
must be power to do as well as to see. 

Remember that the conditions of effec- 
tive treatment concern yourself first and 
chiefly. It is time enough to consider the 
object of treatment after you are in the 
right condition. You must vividly realize 
that Spirit is the only healing power, — ■ 
an omnipotent energy, acting constantly 
throughout all mind and all nature. 
Realize also the oneness of spirit, as the 
absolute life of the universe. Realize that 
man is the image and likeness of God, and 
98 



WHAT TO THINK. 99 

is therefore spirit. You are spirit, your 
patient is spirit, and there is no other 
being; for the real man is spirit. The 
effect of this recognition of God and of 
man as a spiritual being, this attitude of 
thought, is to make the truth habitual and 
familiar to yourself ; not a theory held and 
accepted by the mind merely, but a living 
reality, the center and essence of all 
reality, fully possessing and dominating 
your own thought. 

Affirm to yourself that the real man is 
spiritual, and consequently has intelligence, 
life and power; while as an individual 
he is a reflector or medium of these poten- 
tial attributes of spirit. If your thought 
dwells on the material man, or man of the 
senses, think of him as only an appearance, 
never as the real man. Even his thoughts 
are not the acts of the real man, so long as 
they are inverted. Be clearly persuaded 
also that with his bodily condition you 
have nothing to do ; his physical defects 
you are not to see, for your work is with 
his mind. All disease is in the mind ; 
what is external is nothing but reflection 
and unreal. Address the cause, change 



100 MENTAL HEALING. 

the thought, and the reflection will take 
care of itself. 

The tendency of holding clear and 
correct views of truth yourself will be to 
diffuse around you an atmosphere of 
health. What you really know to be 
true, that will ypti affirm and declare to 
your patient, and nothing else. You may 
tell him the truth ; that is well. You 
may think the truth about him ; that is 
still better. But you (the spiritual man) 
must know the truth ; that heals him. 
Understand that you are not to heal him ; 
spirit heals, and spirit alone. But you 
are spirit, and when the real man in you 
is in actual authority, that authority is felt 
and obeyed by all who come within your 
influence, because all thought belongs to 
the common mind. 

A question often arises in the mind of 
the beginner whether the power that cures 
will act, and whether the patient will feel 
it and respond to it. This solicitude 
makes him think that it is his business to 
explain the nature of the power to the 
patient, to pray God that it may act, and 
then to tell the patient that it is operat- 



RIGHT THOUGHT IS POWER. IOI 

ing on him. This is entirely needless. 
Spirit will and does act. The healing 
power is never lacking for an instant 
Nor need you have the least concern 
about your patient. He will respond, and 
it is not necessary to inquire about the 
effect produced ; for can you not realize 
that spirit is the life of all matter, works 
through all forms, and cannot be resisted ? 
Never doubt for a moment that all right 
thought benefits your patient, and if you 
rest in the truth, you cannot harm him, 
for harm is a name for lack of truth. 
Know, then, that your right thinking will 
change his wrong thinking, so that he will 
know, as you do, that he is not sick. 
Only inverted thought — doubt — can kill ; 
right thought is life. 

But genuine treatment is something 
more than has yet been indicated, and 
goes beyond thought, to that which tran- 
scends thought. If you, the healer, live in 
the truth ; if you are really loyal ; if the con- 
viction becomes so strong in you that you 
come to see that the man of the senses is 
nothing and. that spirit is all; you may 
rise into that higher sphere, where con- 



102 MENTAL HEALING. 

viction becomes knowledge, and you no 
longer think about the fact, for the idea, 
the knowledge of the spiritual man, fully 
possesses you. This is the supreme mo- 
ment when healing takes place. When 
you have reached that lofty state, every 
barrier disappears, and the light bursts 
upon the patient's vision, and the work is 
complete. 

In practice it seems to be more difficult 
to successfully treat one's self than to treat 
another person. The reason for this is 
that, when personally under the influence 
of supposed disease, the appeal of the 
senses is more forcible than when the 
deception shows itself in another. But 
that one can conquer the results of his 
own inverted thinking, there is not the 
slightest occasion to doubt ; and we may 
feel very sure that such a personal victory 
is one of the very best preparations for 
success in the work of treating others. 
We must not, however, make the mistake 
of supposing that he who would attempt 
to bring healing to others must first be 
sound himself. If it were his thought 



NO SET RULES. 103 

instead of spirit power that heals, such 
might be the case. But the experience of 
many, who are very successful as mental 
healers, proves conclusively that it is 
possible to give a powerful and effective 
treatment, while the healer himself has 
failed to demonstrate the truth in his own 
person. 

While all treating is one and the same, 
whether the alleged disease be one thing 
or another, there are certain conditions 
that, in the present stage of the art, it 
is well to take into the account when 
attempting to treat patients. The sugges- 
tions here made do not, however, form 
any invariable rule, and while helpful to 
some beginners, they may chance to be 
of no use to others. For it must not be 
forgotten that effective treatment does not 
consist in or depend upon any set form or 
process. But when one is about to test 
his own powers in a new and untried 
direction, the methods that have proved 
serviceable to so many others, may be 
helpful to him. 

To most persons who consult a mental 
healer the theory and methods of meta- 



104 MENTAL HEALING. 

physical curing are novel. They approach 
him as they would a physician, expecting 
him to examine the bodily symptoms, and 
inquire into the history of their supposed 
complaints. This is but natural, and the 
young practitioner should be decided in his 
own mind how he will meet this expecta- 
tion, what inquiries he will make, and how 
far he will attempt to explain to a novice 
what mental healing is. 

It would be impossible in these respects 
to give specific rules how to proceed in 
each case ; but certain general considera- 
tions and directions may be safely relied 
on. Keep ever before you that your busi- 
ness is not to medicate the symptoms, but 
to break the spell that wrong or inverted 
thought has cast upon the patient. The 
external evidences of the presence of dis- 
ease may look frightfully real to you at 
first; but you must allow them no quarter; 
you must not even compromise with them ; 
for your duty, like that of a soldier in the 
presence of a defiant enemy, is to conquer 
and banish them. 

Too much talk about the disease as it 
appears to your patient would tend to 



CONVERSATION. 105 

make it seem so real both in your mind 
and in his, that the inverted thought 
which it reflects would be hard to dislodge 
and change. It is not wise, then, to 
discuss the complaint with your patient, 
unless there be some valuable object to be 
gained by so doing. If you see that the 
patient wants to "free his mind," before 
he will cordially place himself under your 
treatment, it may be well to let him 
rehearse the story of his bodily troubles. 
Again, if by a little talk or well directed 
inquiry you are able to discover the fear 
which causes the apparent disturbance, 
you have gained a point, and will be able 
to address your treatment directly to that. 
But it is not absolutely necessary for you 
to know the causing fear, or even the 
name and location of the supposed disease, 
in order to treat your patient successfully • 
and you have a decided advantage, if 
you do nothing and say nothing to invite 
attention to it. Banish the thought of 
disease from your own mind and from the 
mind of the patient as soon as possible. 

If you have good judgment and quick 
intuitions (qualities proper to every good 



106 MENTAL HEALING. 

healer,) these are your safest guides in the 
matter of deciding how much and what to 
explain to your patient about your way of 
treating. Some natures will drink in the 
ideas at once, and be so favorably im- 
pressed by them as to be able to help you 
to treat with their own thought. Others 
are too ignorant or obtuse to compre- 
hend spiritual ideas at all, and the im- 
pression of mysterious power produced by 
silent action is far more convincing to 
them than any amount of words would be. 
There is a third class of people with a 
skeptical bias, in whom any attempted 
explanation would only provoke a spirit 
of opposition and argument. These must 
be convinced by actual demonstration ; 
for, like Mrs. Gradgrind, they are " invari- 
ably stunned by some weighty piece of 
fact tumbling on " them. 

Experience in the work will prove the 
most helpful guide in the method of 
dealing with those who present them- 
selves for treatment. We learn by doing ; 
and until the beginner discovers a better 
way, he must trust to tact and his 
knowledge of human nature, to suggest the 



DEALING WITH FRIENDS. 107 

best way of introducing his treatment; 
never losing sight of the fact that, it is 
not the manner of approach, but the 
success of this vital act that opens the 
door to health. 

When the mental healer has decided 
how he will approach the case of his 
patient, he may still be in doubt how best 
to deal with the patient's friends with 
whom he is often brought into contact. 
Friends and attendants who are believers 
in mental cure, and know what sort of a 
mental atmosphere is favorable to restor- 
ing health, may do much to help the 
metaphysician in his work. But, unfor- 
tunately, this is seldom the case ; and the 
friends are usually ignorant on the subject, 
and innocently burdening the invalid with 
just that kind of hurtful sympathy which 
keeps him under a cloud of depression. 
When such is the case, their absence is 
more helpful than their presence, and it is 
desirable to be alone with the patient 
while treating him. A few well-chosen, 
hopeful words will tend, also, to inspire 
the friends with new courage, which may 
in a measure counteract the depressing 



I08 MENTAL HEALING. 

influence they unintentionally exert on 
your patient. 

The effect of a treatment depends, not 
on its length, but on the condition of the 
healer who exercises it, and the dynamic 
power of the thought exerted. The time 
may be from five to fifteen minutes, ac- 
cording to circumstances; and, could one 
always be in the highest condition, a 
momentary thought would be all-sufficient. 
To the question whether a healer is ever 
in such a condition that he is unfit to treat 
a case, the emphatic answer is no ! Re- 
member that treating is simply getting 
yourself into a right frame of mind, so to 
speak, in regard to the patient. It is 
rising out of sense into the spiritual 
realm, — out of the particular into the 
universal. In the act of treating, you are 
not to make an effort to impress your 
patient; you are not to combat him. 
When you realize the truth, when you 
have escaped from the dominion of wrong 
thought and the illusions of the senses, 
spirit power will do the work, truth will 
assert itself in your patient, destroying 
the cause of disease. 



INSTANTANEOUS CURE. IO9 

While in theory we may see instan- 
taneous, complete cure to be the ultimate 
and possible aim of mental treatment, 
that superlative power is not yet attained, 
and we have no authentic evidence that 
such results are vouchsafed to modern 
healers. All that can be at present 
claimed is, that the act by which the 
inverted thought of the patient is changed 
may take place very suddenly, — in fact, 
will be instantaneous, whenever the condi- 
tions are right ; but the legitimate, inevi- 
table results of the changed thinking may 
not appear in the body until later. The 
law has been made that it takes a certain 
space of time for the action of the forces 
that change the condition of the human 
body, just as it takes time for a seed to 
sprout and a tree to grow. So habituated 
are we to the notion of gradual change, 
that a more rapid operation in nature 
excites wonder, and is accounted a miracle. 
While, therefore, patients successfully 
cured by mental treatment, may recover 
more rapidly that those who rely on med- 
icine, instantaneous healing is a result 
hoped for, rather th^n a realized fact. 



IIO MENTAL HEALING. 

Treatments may be given in the presence 
of the patient or when he is absent, as 
circumstances seem to require. Which 
way is more effective cannot be deter- 
mined by any general rule, but must be 
left to the discretion of the healer. It 
may not be well to be confined exclusively 
to either mode, for each has its advantages, 
and as good results appear to follow one as 
the other. Some who treat prefer the 
absent mode, because it is easier when 
treating to shut out of mind the bodily 
presence, and think of the patient only as 
a spiritual being. As a general thing, 
however, it is best, when practicable, to see 
the patient before beginning a course of 
treatment. 

When called to treat persons suffering 
from what are termed acute cases, where 
the progress of the disease is comparatively 
rapid, and the friends of the sick person 
feel that something ought to be done to 
afford immediate relief, prompt, decided 
action is necessary. The treatments 
should be frequent, longer than in other 
cases, and very persistent. In such cases, 
too, the anxieties and fears of friends and 



CHRONIC CASES. Ill 

attendants may be so far aroused by what 
they believe to be the critical character of 
the disease, that it is often necessary to 
treat them, in order to quiet the fear that 
would otherwise disturb the patient. 

People afflicted with chronic complaints 
will not, as a rule, apply to a mental healer 
for treatment, until after they have tried 
all the resources of medicine. When the 
specialists have experimented upon them 
without success, and they despair of 
getting help in any other way, they come 
to the mental healer, as a last resort, and 
often in no very amiable mood. Usually, 
however, such persons are not disposed 
to give the mind-curer an equal chance 
with the physicians, but assume to think 
that if there is anything in it metaphysical 
treatment ought to cure them at once. 
It will be very helpful to the beginner in 
the work of treating, if he succeeds in 
discovering by a little preliminary conver- 
sation, the mental cause of the chronic 
disease, and this may often be found out 
without directly asking about it. 

When called to attend young children, 
do not forget that their diseases are not 



112 MENTAL HEALING. 



reflections of their own thinking, but of 
the fears of parents or other persons who 
have charge of them. They are not old 
enough, or mature enough, to be afraid cf 
being sick; but the atmosphere of fear 
around them in infancy is denser than at 
any other period of their lives. Reach 
children, therefore, through the parents or 
nurses who have them in charge. 

In all his intercourse with patients the 
mental healer should exercise sound judg- 
ment and tact. He should keep in mind 
that Jiis method of healing is not a well 
established mode, like medicine, in which 
the public has confidence; but to the 
majority of people it is virtually a new 
thing, and is looked upon with a degree of 
suspicion. It would seem as if there had 
been a sufficient number of recent cures 
performed by mental means, to satisfy 
even the most skeptical of its therapeutic 
value. But, as a fact, the public is slow 
to accept the evidences of any new claim, 
and has a chronic belief in the possibility 
of being humbugged. Accordingly the 
mental scientist who wishes to succeed 
must be very patient, and willing to 



HIGHER HEALING. 113 

multiply proof upon proof, and hopefully 
await the result. 

The two sources of weakness in those 
who essay to practice mental healing are, 
a lack of faith in the underlying principles 
they advocate ; and a rash confidence, 
that, on close analysis, proves to be a 
reliance on themselves rather than on the 
power that heals. It is very easy to mis- 
take a mental perception of truth for a 
hearty acceptance of it. It is easy to 
persuade one's self that he enters upon 
the work of healing from the highest and 
purest motives, when in reality the step is 
taken to gratify some personal ambition. 
But success in healing is the reward of 
intelligent, honest endeavor, and of noth- 
ing else. 

There is a still loftier view of healing 
to be urged in this connection. While the 
aim of this book has been to point out the 
way and means of bodily healing, it cannot 
have escaped the attention of thoughtful 
students that the cure of physical disease 
is, after all, only a secondary end. Scien- 
tific Christianity has its widest scope when 
it is regarded and used as an agent of 



114 MENTAL HEALING. 

reform. The great moral problem in 
which all good people are interested and 
for which they labor, is how to cure the 
manifold defects resulting to the world 
from ages of wrong thinking on the part 
of mankind. Religious and philanthropic 
bodies of men have usually undertaken to 
bring about the needed reform by means 
of organized, aggressive war against the 
vices of society. They would suppress 
wrong doing, and compel external obedi- 
ence, by the enforcement of stringent laws. 
The church, mistaking the sense of the 
trope that " Spirit is sharper than a two- 
edged sword," have undertaken to grasp 
and wield it, not knowing that this sword 
is impotent except in the hands of Spirit. 
Those who accept the truths of meta- 
physical healing come to see that reform 
is not promoted by fighting. " If my 
kingdom were of this world," said Jesus, 
" then would my servants fight." Not by 
imposing restraints on the actions of men, 
but by changing the thoughts of men, is 
reform to be brought about. Set the real 
or spiritual man in authority, and the 
problem is solved, because in so doing 



HEALING IS REFORM, 115 

you change the cause. The inference, 
then, is that those who have accepted the 
truth of scientific Christianity are privi- 
leged, each in his own sphere, to be 
promoters and channels of the highest 
type of reform. The influence of their 
lives is a blessed gospel of reform to all 
with whom they come in contact. A true 
healer cannot help being such a reformer, 
for his character and right thinking are 
felt whether he is conscious of it or not. 
He need not be continually talking reform, 
or be forming associations for the sup- 
pression of vice. Let him go about his 
proper business; and while he is doing 
with his might the duty that is nearest at 
hand, Spirit, the light and truth of the 
world, will shine through him, and so far 
as he is a transparent medium, will be 
reflected in the dark minds of those about 
him, and they, too, will perceive the light, 
so that the truth shall make them free. 



VIII. 

UNIVERSAL TRUTH. 

If the philosophy explained and taught 
in these pages breathes the spirit of 
true reform, the truth suggested must be 
of universal application. While only 
here and there one may devote himself to 
the profession of mental treatment, " the 
leaves of the Tree of Life are for the 
healing of the nations." Any one may 
understand and appropriate these simple 
principles, and receive incalculable benefit. 
Such doctrines are not the private 
property of the different schools of mind- 
cure, and a sealed book to all others. 
Neither are they a new religion. On the 
contrary the essentials of this moral, as 
well as mental and bodily, healing con- 
stitute the essence of truth as it has been 
taught by all the great moral teachers of 
the world. It is the vital spirit, not only 
of Christianity, but of every religion. It 
is the spirit of obedience to the one law 



MENTAL THEOLOGY. 117 

of eternal Right, which obtains through- 
out the universe of God 

" New opinions 
Divers and dangerous, which are heresies, 
And not reformed, may prove pernicious," 

says Shakespeare. But none need fear 
the consequences of the sweet and whole- 
some doctrine of spiritual truth ; which, 
while it is even older than the race of 
man, revivifies and reinforces all his 
notions of truth, whenever it is received. 
These teachings do not antagonize one's 
religious views, but simply infuse them 
with new life. They do not insist on the 
giving up of any dear forms or modes 
of work or worship ; for they have to do 
not with the act, primarily, but with the 
cause. 

So far as the understanding and recep- 
tion are concerned, this truth does not 
seem to depend on one's theology, his 
learning, or his theory of spirit and 
matter. If he be devoutly pious, it seems 
to come to him through the channel of 
his religious nature ; if he be ignorant and 
superstitious, it seems to avail itself of his 



I\8 MENTAL HEALING. 

beliefs in the supernatural ; if he be what 
is termed a " Spiritualist," he recognizes 
the one supreme Intelligence as acting 
through various personal intelligences ; 
if he dissent from all religious creeds, it 
impresses him as the ethical force, or 
great law of the universe. The only 
element in any creed which is destroyed 
by the acceptance of this truth is that 
which is non-essential and selfish; for it 
comes not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. 
The truth herein inculcated touches 
every doctrine and act of religion and 
piety, investing it with new meaning, so 
that it is no longer a form, but comes to 
be the appropriate expression or reflection 
of the spiritual man. Prayer, for ex- 
ample, whatever one may believe about it, 
is seen in the light of this truth to be the 
action of the real man, as a transparent 
reflector of spiritual power. Atonement 
is seen to be that perfect harmony of 
being, in which mental perception corre- 
sponds to spiritual ideas, and nature is a 
true reflection of correct thought. Man is 
then at one ; the idea and image of God ; 
an organ through which the influx of 



THE BREAD OF LIFE. II9 

spiritual intelligence flows without inter- 
ruption. 

The line of reflection suggested by a 
perusal of this book enforces the lesson 
that it is high time for people to avail 
themselves of the healing benefits which 
the reception of the truth would surely 
bring them. The need of such help as it 
promises is painfully apparent wherever 
we go, and man with all his wisdom and 
scientific skill has failed to invent or 
discover any substitute for it. The heal- 
ing art of medicine does not cure all 
bodily diseases, and is utterly powerless to 
reach the cause of the trouble and change 
the inverted thought of the sick ; morality, 
philanthropy, and religion, (or what these 
terms popularly stand for,) have failed to 
reform the world or relieve the misery of 
human existence ; why should not this 
new-old truth that the real man is spirit, 
and cannot be subject to disease, sin, and 
death, be proclaimed, accepted, and ap- 
plied as a sovereign remedy for human ills ? 

In his Harvard oration, Professor James 
Russell Lowell has pointed out that the 
highest office of education is to "distribute 



120 MENTAL HEALING. 

the true Bread of Life, . . . and to 
breed an appetite for it." And what is 
the " true bread of life," if it be not to 
know that we are spirit, and may rise by 
the understanding of truth superior to all 
the ills of life ? Can there be a higher 
education than to know God and keep His 
commandments? to know the truth that 
sets men free from the bondage of the 
senses ? 

In the Gospel of St. John we find a 
very clear record of the teachings of Jesus 
concerning this bread of life. The people 
failed to understand the true meaning of 
the expression, just as people do at the 
present day. To make it plain and en- 
force the practical lesson, the great Master 
reiterated the truth in different phrases, 
among which are : " Labor not for the 
meat which perisheth, but for that meat 
which endureth unto everlasting life." 
" My father giveth you the true bread 
from heaven." " I am the Bread of Life : 
he that cometh to me shall never hunger." 
" For I came down from heaven, not to 
do mine own will, but the will of him that 
sent me." " Every man therefore that 



QUOTATIONS. 121 

hath heard, and hath learned of the 
Father, cometh unto me." " If any man 
eat of this bread, he shall live forever." 
" As the living Father hath sent me, and I 
live by the Father ; so he that eateth me, 
even he shall live by me." " He that 
eateth of this bread shall live forever." 

The benefits of accepting and living 
the great truth which Jesus brought to 
men from God his Father and the Father 
of us all, are well expressed in the words 
that the poet laureate of England has put 
into the mouth of Prince Arthur: 

" Then might we live together as one life, 
And reigning witli one will in everything, 
Have power on this dark land to lighten it, 
And power on this dead world to make it live." 

When the spiritual man shall come into 
authority, how true and forcible will be 
the words of George Herbert, written 
nearly three hundred years ago : 

" Man is all symmetry, 
Full of proportions, one limb to another, 
And to all the world besides. 
Each part may call the farthest brother; 
For head and foot hath private amity, 
And both with moons and tides. 



122 MENTAL HEALING. 

" More servants wait on man 
Than he '11 take notice of. In every path 
He treads down that which doth befriend him 
When sickness makes him pale and wan. 
O mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath 
Another to attend him." 

THE END. 



BOSTON COLLEGE 

OF 

Metaphysical Science, 



Incorporated. November, 1886. 



L. M. MARSTON, M.D., President. 

(Normal Graduate of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.) 



CLASSES FORMED MONTHLY. 



TWELVE LESSONS CONSTITUTE A COURSE. 



Students thoroughly and practically taught the Science 
of Spiritual and Christian Healing. 

NO. 130 CHANDLER STREET, 

BOSTON, MASS. 



Mental Healing Monthly. 



A MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE FURTHERANCE OF 

THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF SPIRITUAL AND 

CHRISTIAN HEALING. IT IS NOT CONFINED 

TO ANY ONE SCHOOL OF THOUGHT. 

BUT ITS COLUMNS ARE OPEN 

ALIKE TO ALL. 



PRICE, $1.00 A YEAR. 



PUBLISHED BY THE 



MENTAL HEALING PUBLISHING CO., 

130 Chandler St., Boston, Mass. 



A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST CHURCH 

Has been organized and incorporated in the city of 
Boston, called "Church of the Divine Unity." 
Sunday services under its auspices are open to the 
public. Place of worship, 5 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 



CATALOGUE OF BOOKS AM) PAMPHLETS 

ON 

/Heptal Seiei^e apd Qtyristiap Jtealii^, 

FOR SALE BY 

L. M. MARSTON, M.D., 

President of the Mental Science and Christian Healing Association, 
130 CHANDLER ST, BOSTON. 



The afflicted should bear in mind that thousands of sick: people 

have been cured by Christian Mental Science, many 

by reading the books alone. 



Essentials of Mental Healing, Dr. L. M. Marston $1.00 

Science and Health, Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy, 590 pp., cloth, post- 
paid 3.18 

Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics, Dr. W. F. 

Evans : just out, the best yet, cloth, postpaid 1.50 

Primitive Mind Cure, Dr. W. E. Evans, 225 pp., cloth, post- 
paid 1.50 

Divine Law of Cure, Dr. W. E. Evans, 302 pp., cloth, post- 
paid 1.50 

Christian Healing, Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy, postpaid 25 

The People's God, Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy, postpaid 25 

The Unfolding ; or, Mind Understood, the Healing Pow- 
er, Mrs. Clara E. Choate, lecture, 21 pp., paper, postpaid. . .26 
True Christianity: The Basis of Healing with Mind, 

Mrs. Clara E. Choate, lecture, 27 pp., paper, postpaid . . .20 



2 CATALOGUE OF BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS. 

Mental Healing, Mrs. Clara Choate $ .20 

Scientific Possibilities of Mind Healing, Mrs. Clara 

Choate 20 

Mind in Healing, Rev. C. A. Bartol, D.D .10 

The Reason Why, Mrs. Edward H. Cobb, lecture, 17 pp., 

postpaid 25 

The Law of Perfection, Mrs. A. M. Diaz, 10 pp., paper, post- 
paid 10 

Spirit as a Power, Mrs. A. M. Diaz, 24 pp., paper, postpaid, .25 

Leaves of Healing, Mrs. A. M. Diaz .10 

The True History of Mental Healing, Julius A. Dresser, .20 

Philosophical Realism, W. I. Gill paper, .85; cloth, 1.50 

Personified Unthinkables ; an argument against physical 

causation, Sarah Stanley Grimke, 36 pp., paper, postpaid, .30 
Mind in Medicine, No. 4, just issued, Rev. C. A. Bartol, 

D.D., postpaid 20 

Trust in the Infinite, Mrs. A. B. Newman, postpaid 10 

Christian Science is not Pantheism, C. M. Barrows, post- 
paid .10 

Bread Pills, C. M. Barrows, postpaid 35 

Mind over Matter, Emil M. Kirchgessner, 32 pp 25 

Healing Power of Thought, Mrs. E. G. Stuart, postpaid. . .10 

Theosophy of the Christ, J. H. Dewey, M.D 35 

The Word of the Lord, concerning sickness, from Genesis 

to Revelation, G. W. McCalla, 64 pp., postpaid 12 

Metaphysical Queries, W. J. Colville 25 

In His Image, by Eldridge Smith 15 

What is Christian Science? Ursula M. Gestefeld .10 

Who carry the Signs ? Emma Hopkins 25 

What is Thought? Miss S. C. Clark 15 

Direction for Health on a Metaphysical Basis, Ellen H. 

Shelpon 20 




H. H. Carter & Karrick's Popular Publications. 



THE LILT CENSER. {Illustrated.) 
Poems and fragments of poems 
about lilies. A dainty book. Bound 
in white and gold. Price, 75 cents. 

UNDERTONES. Bound and printed in 
violet. The key-note of this very attrac- 
tive book is as follows : — 
" If I list to sing of sad things oft, 
It is that sad things in this life of breath 
Are truest, sweetest, deepest." 

Price, 75 cents. 

GOLDEN AFTERNOON. Love's After- 
Tears. A very choice collection of short 
poems. The book bound in white and 
gold. Suitable for wedding anniversary 
gift. Made by request to meet such a 
demand. Price, 75 cents. 

ONLT A LITTLE BROWN SPARROW. 

Beautifully printed in brown. Cover 
engraved on steel. Price, 35 cents. 

PARADISE, PARADISE. This fa- 
vorite hymn by W. F. Faber. Illus- 



trated. In white covers, with passion 
vine in gold. Price, 50 cents. 

SELECTIONS FROM CANON FARRAR. 

In paper cover. With cut of Trinity 
Church, Boston. New edition, enlarged. 
Bound in white and gold. Put up in a 
very artistic manner in neat box. Price, 
75 cents. 

CUPS OF GOLD. Price, 50 cents. 

GOLDEN GLEANINGS. Price, 50 cents. 

MORNING GLORT. Price, 50 cents. 

FAIR THOUGHTS FOR HAPPT HOURS. 

New edition. Price, 75 cents. 

STRAT LEAVES FROM JOHN RUS- 
KIN. Price, 75 cents. 

SUNBEAMS FROM THE GOLDEN 
LAND. By Francis Ridley Haver- 
gal. Price, 75 cents. 

CONSECRATION HTMN. By Francis 
Ridley Havergal. With photograph 
of Authoress. Price, 20 cents. 



Any of the above publications sent postpaid, on receipt of price, by the publishers, 

H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, 3 Beacon Street, Boston. 



CHRISTMAS, BIRTHDAY, AM) AMIYERSARY CARDS BY MAIL. 



No. 1. — For 50 cents and 4 cents for postage, 17 Prang's, Hildesheimer 
& Faulkner, Ward's, and other finest Christmas and New Tear Cards, to- 
gether with a handsome double Fringed Card. 

No. 2. — For 50 cents and 4 cents for postage, 10 large and fine cards from 
the above publishers, with 1 fine Frosted Card. 

No. 3. — For SI and 6 cents for postage, a choice selection of 25 beautiful 
cards of Prang's, Hildesheimer & Faulkner, etc., together with a hand- 
some illuminated folding Souvenir containing Bell's Across the Snow, 
Miss Havergal, or King Out, "Wild Bells, Tennyson, or Xmas Bells, Long- 
fellow. 

No. 4. — For SI and S cents for postage, a selection of 10 of our largest 
and finest Cards, together with a Mistletoe Memories Bannerette, or 
what the Poets say about Xmas, fringed with cord and tassel. Publisher's price, 
75 cents. 

No. 5. — For SI and 10 cents for postage, 10 double Fringed Cards 
(not folding) , each in a separate envelope, together with an Antique Christ- 
mas Card. 

No. 6. — For 35 cents and 2 eents for postage, 8 Prang's, Ward's, 
Tuck's, and other beautiful cards. 

No. 7. — For 50 cents and 4 cents for postage, 5 fine Chromo-litho, 
printed on Satin in colors. Mounted. 

No. 8. — For SI and 4 cents for postage, 6 large and beautiful Satin 
Cards, with gilt edge. 

No. 9. — For SI and 8 cents for postage, 8 beautiful Screen Folding 
Cards, with verses on some, by Miss Havergal, Tennyson, and Longfellow. 
Retail prices from 15 to 75 cents each. 

BIRTHDAY PACKET. For 50 cents, 10 fine Cards of Prang's, Tuck's, 
with one large Card, 7x8. 

SUNDAY-SCHOOL PACKET. 30 Marcus Ward's, Prang's, etc., 50 cents 
and 4 cents for postage. 

STAMPS OR POSTAL NOTES RECEIVED. 

Hand-painted Cards, Pearl Cards, and Cards Carved in Cork, and other 
Novelties at 10, 15, 25, 50 and 75 cents, and SI each, for Christmas, Birth- 
day, or Anniversary, which will be selected with care for different tastes and 
ages, as specified. 

TO TEACHERS ONLY. 

50 Marcus Ward's, Prang's, and other beautiful Cards, no two alike, for SI 

and 8 cents for postage. Better assortment, S3 and 10 cents for postage. A 

very choice selection, no two alike, S3 and 20 cents for postage and registering. 

We refer by permission to Hon. E. S. Tobby, Postmaster, Boston, and to the 

publishers of the Youth's Companion. 

TO AGENTS AND DEALERS, 
Or ANY ONE ordering S5, and 40 cents for postage and registering, of the 
above packets, at one time, a SI packet will be sent free, and as the small- 
est card in any of these packages will sell readily for five or ten cents each, a 
handsome profit can be realized. 
Every packet will he sent in pasteboard Protectors, and heavy envelope wrappers, 
for safe transmission. 



For the convenience of those who desire to save their cards, we have arranged 
with Marcus Ward & Co. for a line of their artistically designed ALBUMS, at 
very low pi-ices, which we offer by mail, postpaid : 

ONE ALBUM, cloth bound, toned paper, size Q% X 8)4 . . . . $ .35 
ONE ALBUM, " " " 8% X \0% . . . . .75 

ONE ALBUM, " " " 10 X 11J£ .... 1.25 

ONE ALBUM, " " " 11 X 14 ... . 1.84 

We recommend large-sized Albums, where room for artistic arrangement of cards 
is desired. These are the best made and most desirable Card Album in the market. 

H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, 3 Beacon Street, Boston. 



WE MAKE A SPECIALTY OF ENGRAVING, STAMPING, ETC. 

Engraving Steel Monogram Die $2.00 

Engraving Steel Address Die 2.00 

Stamping from same (any color), 15 cents per quire, and 15 cents per 
pack of envelopes. 

Engraving Tlate for Visiting Cards 1.00 

Printing 50 Cards on Heaviest Bristol from same 75 

WEDDING INVITATIONS EXECUTED IN THE LATEST STYLE. 
Printing letter headings neatly in ttpe, $1.75 per 1000. All work is done under 
DUr own supervision, and satisfaction guaranteed. 



Any Teacher can order of us the following prices by Mail 

1 Gross Gillott's Pens, 303 85 cents. 



Estabrook " 333 60 cents (as good) . 

Gillott's " 404 45 cents. 

Estabrook " 444 40 cents (as good). 

Spencerian " 1 80 cents. 

Estabrook " 128 60 cents (as good). 



Assorted Sample Dozen, 6 cents. Sent by mail on receipt of price. 



DIXON'S AMERICAN GRAPHITE PENCILS. 

FIVE REGULAR GRADES OF HARDNESS OF LEADS. 

S — Soft. For heavy shading in sketch drawing. 

SI — Soft Medium. The most popular number. 

M — Medium. For professional and desk work, and all finer uses where a harder 

lead than the S M is wanted. 
H — Hard. A hard, but smooth, lead, suitable for ledger work or outline drawing; 

for civil engineers, architects, draughtsmen, etc. 
V H — Very Hard. For the finest lines, almost equal to engraving, but still black 

and smooth. 

Price per dozen, 40 cents, and 4 cents postage. 



"HOME CIRCLE" STATIONERY BOXES BY MAIL. 

These papers and envelopes are Extra Heavy, and of the following tints: 
Cream, Fawn, Drab (light and dark), Violet, Chocolate, Azure, Blue (light 
and dark), Primrose, "White, Rose, Caledonia, Moss Green. We offer them 
as follows : — 

1-QUIRE BOX contains 24 Sheets, in 2 Tints, and 24 Envelopes to match, postpaid, $ .40. 

2--QUIRE BOX " 48 " 4 " " 48 " " " .75. 

3-QUIRE BOX " 72 " 6 " " 72 " " " I. IO. 

4-QUIRE BOX " 96 " 8 " " 96 " " " 1.40. 

SEND STAMPS OR POST OFFICE ORDER. 

H. H. CAETEE & KAEEICK, 3 Beacon Street, Boston. 



PAPER BY THE POUND, 



OF ETVB3MY GRADE, 



LOWEST PRICES IN AMERICA. 



We are the New England Agents for the Hurlbut Paper 
Co. (established in 1822), also for Marcus Ward's Irish 
Linen Papers, and carry in stock at all times the largest 
and most complete stock of Folded Papers of any house 
(wholesale or retail) in Boston, including a large variety of 

BOND , PARCHMENT , FLAX, and LINEN PAPERS, all Weights and 
Sizes, with Envelopes to match, 

The fine qualities of Bond and Linen papers (now becom- 
ing popular for business and light correspondence) cannot 
be obtained except at prices that are often exorbitant. We 
sell direct from the mills to the consumer, thus giving lowest 
prices possible. For the convenience of our customers, we 
will send complete sample sheets of the different varieties 
of paper and envelopes, with prices and number of sheets 

to a pound for 

FIFTEEN CENTS. 



H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, 

3 Beacon Street, Boston. 






83 4% 



■ 

1 



<~ *T7i*~ G^ 




*^ 






.«fe/. ; 



3* % ' 



v .& 



.«••. 















* c "V & <+ ^ aC * ^ *« 







**>*« 



* 1 







o t^ r 



» 



P-r, 



*>"%. . 



5- 



V^V^ V^V V*^V 



4^ 






^ .--sate \ Aj^t p - ^^S 



4.°"V v 









,♦ 



v^.. 



\^ 2 









V*' 






< 






*°.ir*- -^ 


















^•iX^A 






"o v : 



¥ > ^ 



* ^ -Jf 













■^o* 



• 4 &* * 



* - . - • 



V 








: *> « 






.•*«?* *.' 



i*' 



/ -o 



A V *•"* ■& 









3 s ^ 







JUN83 



! 



N. MANCHESTER, 
^EH^ INDIANA 46962 







